November 1998

Monthly Archive

Thu 19 Nov 1998

International correlation between gun ownership and homicide

Posted by Tim Lambert under international
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Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths Wall Street Journal, 11 Nov. 1998 By John R. Lott JR.

  • The U.S. has a high murder rate because Americans own so many guns. There is no international evidence backing this up. The Swiss, New Zealanders and Finns all own guns as frequently as Americans, yet in 1995 Switzerland had a murder rate 40% lower than Germany’s, and New Zealand had one lower than Australia’s. Fin- land and Sweden have very different gun ownership rates, but very similar murder rates. Israel, with a higher gun ownership rate than the U.S., has a murder rate 40% below Canada’s.

The international correlation between gun ownership and homicide is not perfect, so it possible for Dr Lott to cherry-pick a subset of countries to “prove” that there is no correlation. However, he has hasn’t even done that competantly. Here is data on homicide rate and household gun ownership percentages taken from here

        homicide  gun ownership 
 USA         7.6  48
 Switzerland 1.2  27
 Finland     3.0  23
 New Zealand 2.0  22
 Australia   1.9  19
 Sweden      1.3  15
 W.Germany   1.2   9

I counted six errors of fact in just two of his sentences.

 

Tue 24 Nov 1998

John Lott’s piece in the Wall Street Journal

Posted by Tim Lambert under Kellermann
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Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths
Wall Street Journal, 11 Nov. 1998
By John R. Lott Jr.

The family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense. The 1993 study yielding such numbers, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. Instead, if a household owned a gun and if a person in that household or someone he knew was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed. In fact, virtual- ly all the killings in the study were committed with guns brought in by an intruder. No more than 4% of the gun deaths in the study can be attributed to the home- owner’s gun.

This is so completely and thoroughly wrong that it makes me wonder whether Dr Lott even read the study that he is criticising. Heck, I don’t think he even read the abstract.

  1. The study did not find that the “family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense”. It found, and I quote from the abstract “guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.”

  2. It is not true that virtually all the killings were committed with guns brought in by an intruder. The data is publically available on the net and shows that less than 10% of the killings were of this type. Note also that the abstract refers to family and lovers rather than intruders.

  3. It is not true that no more than 4% of the gun deaths in the study can be attributed to the homeowner’s gun. In fact, the majority of them can be.