Deltoid

Peter K. Boucher said:

We have higher homicide rates than many nations, but guns aren’t the cause of it. In any case, this kind of comparison can be used by both sides (Mexico has stricter gun control and more homicide, while Switzerland has more gun owners and less homicide), but it remains IRRELEVANT.

Progunners have to reach into the third world and get their facts wrong for their comparisons — Switzerland does not have more gun owners than the US (no matter whether you count total owners, percent owners, or militia guns as `owned’).

If you would like to argue that such comparisons are relevant, perhaps you can explain to me why the homicide rate in Japan is 2.3 TIMES as high as the homicide rate among Japanese-Americans (who live here — where all the guns are).

Easy. It isn’t.

In “Point Blank” Gary Kleck writes:

“One way one might crudely and partially control for United States-Japan cultural differences is to compare homicide rates among Japanese-Americans, who live where guns are plentiful, with the homicide rates of their presumably culturally similar brethren in Japan, where private gun ownership is nearly nonexistent. Certainly this pair of populations is more comparable than the population of Japan compared with the entire U.S. population.

Not necessarily. The US does not accept immigrants with criminal records, so this group of Japanese-Americans will be less likely to commit homicide than the general Japanese population.

Up through 1979, the FBI reported homicide arrests sorted by racial breakdowns which included “Japanese.” For the period 1976-1978, 21 of 48,695 arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter were of Japanese-Americans, or 0.04% (U.S. FBI 1977-1979).

A 95% confidence interval is 0.03% to 0.07%.

Applying this fraction to the total of 57,460 homicides yields an estimate of 24.78 killings by Japanese-Americans for 1976- 1978, or about 8.26 per year.

This assumes that there is no racial bias in the arrest patterns of any US police force.

With 791,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States in 1980 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1984), this translates into an annual rate of 1.04 homicides per 100,000 population.

There are two different definitions of “Japanese” being used here – Japanese ancestry (note that a person can have multiple ancestries) and police ticking a box marked “Japanese” on an FBI form (what do they do if they don’t know/care?).

Considering all the factors above, we can guess that the homicide rate for Japanese-Americans is somewhere between 0.5 and 3.0 per 100,000 pop.

For the same 1976-1978 period, the annual homicide rate in Japan averaged 2.45 (United Nations 1982, pp. 192, 718).

No it didn’t. Kleck can’t read. That’s the rate for BE50 “All other external causes”. The reference does not tell us the homicide rate for 76-78, but if Kleck had turned to page 777 he would have discovered that for 79 they split category BE50 into AM54 (Homicide) and AM55 (Other violence), with rates of 1.0 and 1.5 respectively. That is, homicides were 40% of the “All other external causes” deaths. If this was true for 76-78, the homicide rate in those years was 0.98 per 100,000 pop.

Thus, crudely controlling for Japanese culture in this way indicates that in Japan, where civilian gun ownership is virtually nonexistent and gun control laws are extremely strict, the homicide rate is 2.3 times as high as it is among Japanese-Americans living where guns are easily available and gun laws are far less restrictive.'’

The Japanese homicide rate is probably lower than that of Japanese Americans, but there is insufficient data to have any certainty.

Nosy said:

Perhaps Lambert can explain why the US murder RATE in which feet and/or fists were used as weapons is higher than the Canadian or UK murder rate with the same weapons.

Are feet and/or fists more “readily available” in the United States than in Canada or the UK?

Why Nosy, didn’t you know that weapon availability is not the sole determinate of the homicide rate? Given that, why can’t you come up a international comparison to support your position involving first world nations?

Switzerland does not have more gun owners than the US (no matter whether you count total owners, percent owners, or militia guns as `owned’).

Reallllly? I would like to see a citation on this, if I might. I have reason to believe that a higher percentage of Swiss homes have a firearm inside than in the US.

Look in “Experiences of Crime across the World” van Dijk, Mayhew and Killias (1991). This reports the result of an international victimisation survey in the US, Canada, Australia and 11 European countries. Handguns were present in 29% of US households. Switzerland was second with 14% (about half of these were identified as army guns). The US also had the highest percentage of households with any sort of gun.

Larry Cipriani said:

KLECK: About 8 percent of the defensive uses involved a sexual crime such as an attempted sexual assault. About 29 percent involved some sort of assault other than sexual assault. Thirty-three percent involved a burglary or some other theft at home.

33% of 2,500,000 is 825,000. NCS data gives 1,000,000 burglaries each year when there is someone at home. So in 83% of these burglaries a gun was used for defence?? NCS asked: 3% said they used a gun for self-defence.

Twenty-two percent involved robbery.

22% of 2,500,000 is 550,000. NCS data gives about 1,000,000 robberies each year. So in 55% of these robberies a gun was used for defence?? NCS asked: 1% said they used a gun for self-defence.

criminal. And then in 8 percent they actually did wound or kill the offender.

Kleck has estimated that 15% of gunshot wounds are fatal. So: 15% of 8% of 2,500,000 is 30,000. If we believe this survey, we must conclude that there are 30,000 justifiable with-gun homicides in the US each year.

This is much more than twice the number of with-gun homicides, criminal and non-criminal.

This is 10-20 times Kleck’s estimate of the number of justifiable with-gun homicides in the US each year.

It is 80 times the official FBI count of justifiable with-gun homicides.

Sorry, this statistic is totally unbelievable.

Kleck’s survey:
(1) 2,500,000 defensive uses
(2) 8% of these involve wounding/killing a criminal.

Therefore: 8% of 2,500,000 = 200,000 defensive uses involve wounding/killing a criminal.

Kleck’s earlier research:
(3) 15% of gunshot wounds are fatal.

David Barton said:

I strongly suspect a combination of 2 and 3. Note that (as I recall, in the dim recesses of my memory; I would appreciate correction) Kleck arrived at the 15% figure by dividing reported gun woundings against reported fatalities. I suspect that: eyewitness reports by those involved in incidents will over-report woundings (actually, this is fairly common in police circles), and that many of the minor woundings will go unreported. All this is purely intuitive.

Certainly 1. could not be wrong. You need to find a factor of 15 to get a figure for justifiable homicides that is consistent with criminological research. You therefore seem to be claiming that most of the respondents that said they wounded a criminal in fact missed, and most of the wounds were of the trivial type that no-one bothers reporting to the police. That is, in only 0.5% of the cases did the citizen get a good hit on the bad guy. Since 14% of the time they tried to shoot the criminal, thats not a very good ad for with gun self-defence. It seems like the criminal is safest where the citizen is aiming. Also note that 1% of Kleck’s respondents volunteered that they killed the criminal (that is, the percentage may be higher) so the fatality rate amongst Kleck’s sample seems to be at least 12.5%. This is remarkably consistent with the 15% figure above.

Michael J. Phelps said:

Is it not possible that many unsuccessful robberies are not reported, thus not included in the NCS data?

NCS data is not based on reports, but a very extensive survey.

Consider that a person who is on the receiving end of an attempted robbery didn’t loose anything [so what are they reporting?], may not consider themselves a victim [after all, the crime wasn’t completed], and doesn’t see what benefit there would be in spending the time reporting the attempt.

The NCS asks “did anyone try to rob you?”

On a personal note, 5 guys tried to rob me some years ago; they didn’t complete the attempt [no gun, i had a knife in my hand (not the sharp end!) with my hand in my jacket pocket - they never saw it] and i never reported it - it just seemed like a waste of time [now that i’m more enlighted, perhaps i would].

If you had been asked by NCS “did anyone try to rob you?” would you have told them?

Furthermore, depending on the prevailing laws and attitudes of the area, one who drew a gun in self-defense might risk harrassement or criminal prosecution [i know women who carry illegally in New York City; reporting anything short of a shooting would be self-incriminating and undoubtedly result in a felony conviction]; thats a strong disincentive to report!

Sure, some may not believe the NCS’s promise of anonymity. But we’re talking about a discrepancy of a factor of 50 times. I cannot believe that 98% of defensive users would conceal it from the NCS, but tell Kleck about it.

C. D. Tavares said:

Hey, Tim — perhaps you can compare the ten largest US cities — the places where the vast majority of US violent crime occurs — with third world nations, and then enumerate for us the sociological factors for which there is a tinker’s damn worth of difference between the two.

If you want to claim that the ten largest US cities are similar to third world nations then it is up to you to do the research.

If you want something easier, you could trying looking up some crime figures and tell us what percentage of US violent crime occurs in the ten largest cities. Bet you don’t find that it is a “vast majority”.

Jon Buck said:

NCS didn’t do a very good job of asking; they only asked about defensive weapon use after the respondent answered positively to having been a victim of a crime.

Right, so cases where someone whipped out a gun without being threatened with violence weren’t counted.

Kleck makes this criticism of the NCS (in “Point Blank”, if I remember correctly). This leaves out the case of successful self-defense, in which the intended victim was not victimized because they used a gun in self-defense;

No it doesn’t. Such a person is still a victim of the crime of attempted robbery, or assault, or attempted whatever.

obviously, most of these people would have answered negatively to the question “Have you been a victim of a crime?”

Since NCS does not ask this question, this point is irrelevant.

You have misunderstood Kleck’s criticism. He is arguing that NCS undercounts crimes such as domestic assaults and therefore undercounts defensive gun uses in such situations. A valid criticism, but the undercount would have to be truly vast to account for the discrepancy between the 80,000 NCS derived count of defensive gun uses and Kleck’s 2.5M. Nor is there any evidence that NCS significantly undercounts burglaries, so it does not account for the factor of 28 discrepancy above.

Read the article again; Kleck gives 2,500,000 as the upper bound for self-defense uses, and 800,000 as the lower bound. Obviously, the real number is probably somewhere in between. The same criticism of the NCS figure applies here, too; robberies prevented by with-gun self-defense are likely to go undiscovered using their questioning methodology.

NCS asks: “Did anyone try to rob you?” Are successful defenders going to say “no”?

Point the first: I don’t think Kleck’s 15% number is all that accurate, since it is derived by dividing gun deaths into gun woundings, and gun woundings are likely to be underreported, especially minor ones received by criminals shot at by their victims, which is what we are talking about.

Sure, it is possible that the correct figure is, say, 10%. It would have to be 1% to explain the discrepancy, though, and this is just not believable.

Point the second: even police officers involved in shootings tend to over-report woundings of the people they shot; I see no reason why a civilian poll would be any different. Note that some of Kleck’s other data suggests that only 1-2% of self-defense uses involve killing or wounding the attacker.

This was computed by taking Kleck’s estimate of 1500-2800 justifiable with-gun homicides, and applying the 15% fatality rate to get 9000-17000 woundings and dividing by his estimate of 1M self-defense uses. Since his estimate of self-defense uses was an input to the calculation, we cannot use this figure to cross check the validity of his estimate of defense uses.

Running your same calculations with the two percent number yields 7500 justifiable with-gun homicides, which is still high but closer to a realistic number. Using Kleck’s old figure of 1.2 million self-defenses (still within the range he is claiming), and the two percent figure, we get 3600 justifiable homicides, which is much more reasonable than 30,000, and closer to the 1,500 to 3,000 number claimed by Kleck and others.

Not surprising: This calculation boils down to:

   3000*.15*1.2M
   -------------
        .15*1M

It would have come out exactly if you had used Kleck’s original 1M estimate.

Steve Kao said:

Perhaps someone from Switzerland can enlighten us. Are not all males between the ages of 18 and 55 issued rifles?

No. All male Swiss citizens between 20 and 50 who are in the army are issued rifles. Roughly 15% of Swiss residents are not citizens, and 20% of the citizens called up do not serve in the army. So, very roughly, that’s (50-20)/70×0.8×0.85 = 15% of the population.

I would guess that >90% of the households in Switzerland have males between the ages of 18 and 55 in them, implying that >90% of the households have a gun in them.

In the Encyclopedia of the First World, I found the following information:

Pop of Switzerland: 6,800,000
Average household size: 2.5
Size of Swiss army: 625,000

There are therefore 6,800,000/2.5=2,700,000 households in Switzerland. The percentage of households containing a soldier is at most 625,000/2,700,000=23%. (Possibly less if some households have more than one soldier.)

I doubt if >90% of the households in the US have a gun in them.

Correct, it’s about 50%.

Look in “Experiences of Crime across the World” van Dijk, Mayhew and Killias (1991). This reports the result of an international victimisation survey in the US, Canada, Australia and 11 European countries.

Danny Low said:

The last time I looked at an atlas, the world included places like Mexico and other Latin American countries. The book has a rather grandiose title “across the World” but seems to exclude most of the world. Are the countries you listed the only ones in the book? If it is so I would consider the sample to be very biased.

The only countries. They also surveyed Warsaw and Surabaja. Lack of money and a large percentage of population without telephones makes national surveys difficult in second and third world nations.

It is a survey of victimization. So what are the victimization rates and how well do they correlate with gun ownership? You should have 14 sample points to do a correlation analysis.

                 hand  all
                 gun% gun%  A/T  SA   Rob  Bur  Homicide
 England & Wales  0.5  4.7  5.3  3.4  1.9  9.4  0.7
        Scotland  0.5       5.3  2.9  1.8  9.0  1.8
Northern Ireland  1.5       4.3  3.3  1.5  4.7  5.2
     Netherlands  1.0  2.0  9.3  6.4  2.0  8.9  0.9
    West Germany  6.5  9.2  9.3  7.9  3.0  4.7  1.2
     Switzerland 14.0 32.6  3.9  5.5  2.2  4.0  1.2
         Belgium  6.0 16.8  6.4  4.9  4.0  7.7  1.8
          France  5.5 24.7  7.1  4.3  2.9 10.4  1.2
           Spain  2.0       7.5  6.8  9.1  5.6  1.0
          Norway  3.5 31.2  8.2  4.7  1.5  3.2  1.2
         Finland  7.0 25.5  9.7  4.3  2.7  2.0  2.9
             USA 29.0 48.9 12.7 10.4  5.5 13.7  8.8
          Canada  4.0 30.8  8.8 10.0  2.6 10.2  2.1
       Australia  2.0 20.1 11.6 13.5  2.3 16.6  2.0

Key:
hand gun% is the percentage of households reporting hand gun ownership all gun% is the percentage of households reporting any gun ownership (The all gun% numbers do not all appear in the book — I was emailed them, but I think they come from the survey. The reference is Security Journal 1(3):169-174, which I have not been able to check out.) A/T is percentage victim of assault or threats in the past five years. SA is the percentage of women victim of sexual assaults or offensive behaviour in the past five years. Rob is percentage victim of robbery in the past five years. Bur is percentage victim of successful burglary in the past five years. Homicide is the average homicide rate (per 100,000 population) 82-88, from the World Health Organization Statistical Yearbook.

Canada. Gun law in 78.

Homicide rate (per 100,000 population)
74-78 2.7 3.1 2.9 3.0 2.8 average 2.9
79-83 2.7 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.7 average 2.6

(a t test on the statistical significance of the difference of the means gives p=.01)

Thomas Grant Edwards said:

From “Gun Control and Rates of Firearm Violence in Canada and the United States” by R.J. Mundt, in Canadian Journal of Criminology, Jan. 1990, p. 137:

“The mean rate [of homicide] for Canada from 1974-1978 was 2.7, compared to a post-1978 rate (through 1988) of 2.6. One could admit the possibility that this decline resulted from the 1977 legislation, except that the mean rates for the United States in the same periods dropped from 9.2 to 8.9, and almost identical drop.”

Wait a moment. I got 2.9 as the mean homicide rate Canada 74-78, not 2.7. Something is wrong here.

Let me have a look at Mundt’s paper…..

Oh my goodness. Mundt has messed up badly.

Let me try to explain what has happened. There are two ways to count homicides. You can look at death certificates or police records. The numbers are a little different, but it doesn’t matter as long as you don’t mix them up.

I got the death certificate counts from the World Health Organization Statistical Yearbook. I got the police record counts from “The Size of the Crime Problem in Australia” (which got them from Statistics Canada 88). Mundt presents his data in the form of a graph. I extracted the numbers from this. In the graph, a 0.1 homicide rate corresponds to less than a millimetre, so these numbers are +/-0.1.

                    74  75  76  77  78  79  80  81  82  83  84  85  86  87
death certificates 2.5 2.7 2.4     2.5 2.5 2.1 2.3     2.4 2.3 2.1 2.1 2.2
             Mundt 2.5 2.8 2.4 2.6 2.5 2.5 2.1 2.4 2.7 2.7 2.7 2.8 2.2 2.5
    police reports 2.7 3.1 2.9 3.0 2.8 2.7 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.7 2.6 2.7 2.2 2.5

Can you see what has happened here? Mundt has used the lower death certificate numbers for 74-81 and the higher police report numbers for 82-87. This has the interesting effect of canceling out the decrease evident if either death certificate numbers or police report numbers are used.

How did Mundt go wrong? He states that the source of his data was Scarff 83 and Statistics Canada 88. From reading the paper you can discover that “Scarff 83″ covered 74-81, so this is the source of his death certificate numbers, and of course “Statistics Canada 88″ is the source of my police report numbers as well. Mundt’s error is inexcusable, since the “Statistics Canada” reference contained data for 74-81 and he failed to compare these numbers with the “Scarff 83″ numbers.

It is also interesting to compare firearm homicide rates and non-firearm homicide rates. After all, if both firearm homicides and non-firearm homicides decreased by the same percentage, it would be unreasonable to conclude that the gun law had any effect.

                                                                  ave   ave
          74  75  76  77  78  79  80  81  82  83  84  85  86  87 74-78 79-87
firearms 1.4 1.4 1.2 1.2 1.1 0.9 0.9 0.8 1.0 0.9 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.8  1.3   0.9
other    1.3 1.7 1.7 1.8 1.7 1.8 1.6 1.8 1.7 1.8 1.7 1.9 1.5 1.7  1.6   1.7
methods

t-tests show that difference in the means for firearms is significant (p=0.00003) while the slight increase for other methods is not (p=0.39).

Of course, here is the big kicker in Canada: Let’s say you do believe that the pre-1977 murder rates are more than the post-1977 murder rates enough to make it worth your while.

“…there are now 1,275,000 more firearms in private ownership in Canada than when the Act was passed — about 11,960,000, or 46,000 per 100,000 population.”

Mundt has only counted gun purchases, he has not allowed for guns being sold/junked, so I don’t see how he can draw this conclusion. In any case, number of guns per 100,000 population is an almost useless measure of gun availability. By this measure guns are equally available in the case where each of ten people has one gun and the case where one has ten and the other nine none. To put it another way, the gun purchases could have been mostly by people who already had guns.

“The stock of restricted weapons (almost all handguns) increased from an estimated 651,000 in 1976 to 923,000 in 1988 (based on the total number of restricted weapons registered with and reported by the RCMP.”

There doesn’t seem to have been any change in the handgun homicide rate.

So whether or not you believe murder went up, guns certainly did.

The relevant statistic would seem to me to be the percentage of the population with guns, and we have no idea whether that went up or down.

“When compared with the United States, trends in Canada over the past ten years in various types of violent crime, suicide, and accidental death show no dramatic results, and few suggestions of perceptible effects of the 1977 Canadian gun control legislation. This is scarcely surprising, except that expectations were high among the policy formulators, and some evaluations perhaps tried too hard to give them satisfaction. The decrease in use of firearms in robbery appears to be the only change that stands out over time or in comparison with parallel trends in the United States.”

And I’m going to have to take exception to this as well. Lester (Psychological Reports 72(3 Pt 1) 787-790) has shown that firearm suicides were increasing before C-51 and decreasing afterward, while other suicide methods did not have significant trends.

When discussing accidental deaths Mundt says “Death rates from firearms accidents … have been in long-term decline in both countries (Figure 6), with the American rate remaining from two to three times greater.”

Looking at figure 6, we see that both rates decrease from 74 to 78, with the US rate being twice the Canadian rate both in 74 and 78. After 78 however, the US rate declines less rapidly, while the Canadian rate declines dramatically (by 75%!), with the result that in the last four years of the data set (83-86), the US rate is SIX TO SEVEN time greater. I’m puzzled as to what made Mundt think that it was only two to three times greater.

Conclusion: C-51 may have caused significant changes in the homicide rate, suicide rate, and accidental death by firearms rate in Canada.