Dan Day writes:
See Suter, Edgar, M.D., “Guns in the Medical Literature–A Failure of
Peer Review”, Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, March, 1994.
And note those 81 references at the end. This, Buddy,
is what actual support for ones claims looks like.
No, it’s what a pack of lies looks like.
There are dozens of falsehoods, and dozens of claims that are
extremely dubious.
Chris BeHanna writes:
Please do take the time to point each and every one of them out,
and why you think they are false. Go ahead—we’ll wait.
There are so many that I am going to have to put them out a few at a
time. For starters (and to stay on the topic of homicide rates) you
can check Suter’s Graph 16 “International Homicide Rates Comparisons”
against the source he claims for this data (Wold Health Statistics
1989). You will discover that the homicide rates for many countries
have been grossly overstated (for example, East Germany is given as
36.7 (over three times the US rate) instead of 0.7 (less than a tenth
of the US rate). Other countries where Suter h greatly exaggerated
the homicide rate include El Salvador, Mexico, Egypt, Sweden, Finland,
Denmark and Scotland. He has also given very high homicide rates for
Zimbabwe and South Africa. These do not appear in his reference at
all.
I think the next installment will be on the section entitled
“Foretelling the future” I conservatively count five outright
falsehoods and three extremely dubious claims. Not bad for eight
paragraphs :-)
It would be possible to put these down as honest
errors, caused by Suter’s pro-gun bias, except for the following
example which can only have resulted from blatant dishonesty on
Suter’s part:
Crime and homicide rates are highest in jurisdictions,
such as Washington, DC, New York City, Chicago, and
California, where the most restrictive gun licensing,
registration, and prohibition schemes exist. Why are homicide
rates lowest in states with loose gun control (North Dakota
1.1, Maine 1.2, South Dakota 1.7, Idaho 1.8, Iowa 2.0,
Montana 2.6) and highest in states and the district with
draconian gun controls and bans (District of Columbia 80.6,
New York 14.2, California 12.7, Illinois 11.3, Maryland
11.7)?(49) (See Graph 18: “Representative State Homicide
Rates”)
Precisely where victims are unarmed and defenseless is
where predators are most bold.
Got that, folks? Suter claims that gun control caused the homicide
rate to be ten times higher in the restrictive places.
No, he did not. He said, as you quoted above, “Precisely where victims
are unarmed and defenseless is where predators are most bold.”
Are you seriously claiming that Suter is not implying that unarmed
victims cause predators to be most bold???
Here’s another quote where he says it again:
the data suggest that, providing they are in the hands of good
citizens, more guns “on the street” offer a considerable net benefit
to society - saving lives, a deterrent to crime, and an adjunct to the
concept of community policing.
What’s wrong here? Well, for one thing Suter has dishonestly chosen
to represent “states with loose gun control” by the six such states
with the lowest homicide rates, and to represent states with
restrictive gun control by a city and the four such states with the
highest homicide rates. Why didn’t he choose Alaska 9.0, Tennessee
10.2, Georgia 11.4, Alabama 11.6, or Mississippi 13.5 to represent
states with loose gun control and Rhode Island 3.9, Hawaii 3.8,
Minnesota 3.4, Utah 3.1, or Iowa 2.3 to represent restrictive gun
control states? His graph 18
should be entitled “Misrepresentative State Homicide Rates”.
IF Suter was trying to show that gun control causes increased
homicide rates, then your criticism would be very valid. However, that is
not was Suter set out to do. Rather, he set out to demonstrate the falsehood
of the claim that gun control reduces homicide rates, and that lack of gun
control causes increased homicide rates. In that, he was quite successful.
It makes no difference whether he is trying to show that gun control
increases homicide or that it fails to reduce homicide. What he did
is a dishonest misrepresentation of the data. If he had been some
anti-gun person and selected his data so that the homicide rate
appeared to be much lower in gun control states, I’m sure you would
have had no difficulty accusing him of mendacity. Do you have a
double standard, Chris?
D. Deming wrote:
For those interested in statistical criminology, there is
an interesting article that appeared in the scholarly
journal “The Mankind Quarterly”, vol. 35, no. 4, summer,
1995. The article is titled “Ideology and Censorship
in Behavior Genetics” by Glayde Whitney of Florida State
University in Tallahassee.
A most, umm, interesting journal. If I was looking for one word to
describe it I think that word would be “racist”. In one of the other
issues I found an absolutely glowing and entirely uncritical review of
JP Rushton’s “Big dick = little brain” theory about the relationship
between race and intelligence.
Whitney has a figure which shows that the murder rate
for the United States is actually one of the LOWEST,
when the race variable is not included. In other words,
he has compared the white homicide rate in the US with
the homicide rate in other countries which are
predominantly white (e.g., Sweden). Interestingly, in this
comparison, the highest rate is found in that enclave
of perfect socialism: Sweden. The US is actually lower
than England, Switzerland, Denmark, Scotland, France,
E. Germany, Czech., Israel, and Finland. The US rate is
only higher than W. Germany and Belgium, and only marginally
so at that.
Sigh. It must be my week for checking homicide rates. Whitney is
unable to read a table. He has grossly overstated the homicide rates
for all countries other than the United States. Here are his figures
and the correct ones from the source he cites (United Nations
Demographic Yearbook 1992)
Whitney correct
Germany 3.5 1.0
Belgium 3.8 1.6
US (whites) 4.5
England 4.5 0.5
Switzerland 4.6 not given
E. Germany 4.7 1.0
Denmark 4.9 not given
Scotland 4.9 1.5
France 5.0 1.1
Czechoslovakia 5.5 2.0
Israel 6.0 2.4
Finland 7.3 3.1
Sweden 7.4 1.3
US 9.1 9.1
Whitney argues that race rather than environmental factors determines
the crime rate because the US white homicide rate is similar that in
countries populated by white people. As can be seen by the above
table his argument is based on incorrect figures for the homicide
rate. The homicide rate for US whites is much higher than in Europe.
The difference can only be due to environmental factors. (Which might
include guns or might be something else.)
How could Whitney have got the figures so badly wrong? As far as I
can tell, he has added the figure for homicide to that for “other
external causes” and reported this as “murders”. Except that he
didn’t do this for the US. The reference does not report homicide
rates for Switzerland and Denmark, just a figure for homicide and
“other external causes” combined. It would be an understandable error
to report the incorrect figures for Switzerland and Denmark, but
getting the other ones wrong as well is inexcusable.
Whitney complains that his paper was rejected by Behavior Genetics
because it wasn’t “politically correct”. If the editor of that journal
rejected it on those grounds he/she was definitely wrong — it should
have been rejected because it contained gross errors and and a
completely inadequate literature review. (The only study on the
relationship between race and crime he cites is JP Rushton’s. He
ignores, for example, Centerwall’s Atlanta study where black and white
domestic homicide rates were found to be the same once household
crowding was controlled for.)
You can check Suter’s Graph 16 “International Homicide Rates
Comparisons” against the source he claims for this data (World Health
Statistics 1989). You will discover that the homicide rates for many
countries have been grossly overstated (for example, East Germany is
given as 36.7 (over three times the US rate) instead of 0.7 (less than
a tenth of the US rate). Other countries where Suter h greatly
exaggerated the homicide rate include El Salvador, Mexico, Egypt,
Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Scotland. He has also given very high
homicide rates for Zimbabwe and South Africa. These do not appear in
his reference at all.
Steve D. Fisher wrote:
What is Suter’s source of homicide stats?
World Health Statistics 1989
What is your source?
World Health Statistics 1989. A couple of countries I had to get from
the 86, 88 or 90 edition.
For what year was the data presented?
88 for some countries, 89 for others.
Here’s Suter’s data and the correct figures from World Health
Statistics.
World
Health
Suter Statistics 1989
El Salvador ........... 129.4 35.8 (1986)
Zimbabwe .............. 126.2 not given
Mexico ................ 49.4 19.5
East Germany .......... 36.7 0.7 (1990)
Egypt ................. 28.3 0.5 (1990)
South Africa (non-white) 26.8 not given
USA ................... 10.8 8.7
Ecuador ............... 10.0 10.0
Sweden ................ 9.6 1.2
Northern Ireland ...... 7.0 7.0
Finland ............... 6.4 2.7
USSR .................. 6.2 6.2
Denmark ............... 5.7 1.1
Scotland .............. 3.9 3.3
South Africa (white) .. 2.7 not given
Then there are 21 more countries with rates below 2.7 where Suter’s
figures agree with his reference.
