More guns, more murders

Great Debates
1

This grows out of the fact that the gun-friendly USA has, by an enormous margin, the highest murder rate among industrialized nations. Most of the others are far less gun-friendly. It also grows from the fact that I proved a couple years back: that gun-friendly areas of the USA (as determined by concealed-carry laws) have much higher murder rates than other areas. To me this has always been sufficient to prove that guns in the hands of private citizens do not prevent murder, but rather have the opposite effect. Last year, our friendly doper duffer explained his reasoning for not accepting my reasoning.

That sounded quite reasonable, and no one can accuse me of a biased approach since it was duffer who came up with the idea. Crime data is here; concealed-carry laws are here. (Somewhat out-of-date, but I can’t find anything more recent.) Here are the cities , populations, murder rate per 100000, and total murders.

New York, N.Y. 8,143,197 7.4 603 NCC
Los Angeles, Calif. 3,844,829 13.4 515 NCC
Chicago, Ill. 2,842,512 20.6 586 NCC
Houston, Tex. 2,016,582 13.6 274 CC
Philadelphia, Pa. 1,463,281 23.3 341 CC
Phoenix, Ariz. 1,461,575 17.2 251 CC
San Antonio, Tex. 1,256,509 7.0 80 CC
San Diego, Calif. 1,255,540 5.1 64 NCC
Dallas, Tex. 1,213,825 18.4 223 CC
San Jose, Calif. 912,332 3.2 29 NCC
Detroit, Mich. 886,671 39.4 349 CC
Indianapolis, Ind. 784,118 13.1 98 CC
Jacksonville, Fla. 782,623 11.8 92 CC
San Francisco, Calif. 739,426 8.9 66 NCC
Columbus, Ohio 730,657 15.0 110 CC
Austin, Tex. 690,255 4.0 28 CC
Baltimore, Md. 635,815 41.9 266 NCC
Milwaukee, Wis. 578,868 18.5 107 NCC
Boston, Mass. 559,034 6.6 37 NCC
Washington, DC 550,521 44.0 242 NCC

In total, the ten biggest concealed-carry cities have: 1846 murders, about 11,300,000 people, and a rate of 16.4 murders per 100,000.

The non concealed-carry cities have: 2514 murders, about 20,100,000 people, and a rate of 12.5 murders per 100,000.

Non concealed-carry cities win by a long shot.

When creating policy we need to consider all the available data. We cannont cherry-pick only those data we want, like when a poster in the thread linked above wanted to compare only Chicago to Austin, rather than looking at nationwide data. We cannot simply ignore what doesn’t serve our side, as when TheEggman continued to make claims about crimes rates in Britain after they were debunked. Concealed-carry laws correlate with higher murder rates.

(Oh, and duffer, I’ll drop by Monday afternoon to collect the house and dog. You may keep the wife.)

2

Since murder rates are affected by demographic factors like race and class; and since different U.S. cities and different countries have different racial and demographic mixes, your analysis needs to factor this in.

One way to do it would be to look at murder rates before and after some particular law – such as concealed carry – goes into effect. Another way would be to look at the murder rates among particular races/classes.

Unless you do one of these things, your analysis doesn’t mean a whole lot.

3

That’s so obvious I didn’t know people actually had a debate over it.

4

Well, it does mean he won the bet.

5

Certainly more guns in the hands of criminals…

Unfortunately in recent decades many areas have defacto disarmed the law-abiding populace - emboldening the criminal class who can prey on the citizenry with impunity. Killing someone isn’t something to take lightly but better the bad guys than innocents. Washington, D.C. is the poster child of “gun free” carnage.

6

Oops, I wasn’t paying attention to the bet. I’m just thinking about gun control policy.

7

The thing that doesn’t make sense to me is why would increased numbers of people with carry permits, as opposed to more gun possession in general, lead to more murders? There are places where public carry permits are difficult or near-impossible to obtain, yet people are still allowed to buy guns and keep them in private residences. So carry permits should be irrelevent to firearm deaths that take place in the home: suicide, murder of family members, accidental shootings, etc. And presumably members of high-risk sections of the population- career criminals, etc.- are going to either not be eligible for permits or not bother to get them. And finally of course people setting out to commit premeditated murder are not going to give a **** about permit laws. So what is the OP claiming? That previously law-abiding people turn into cowboys and start shooting people on the street and in bars as soon as you put a gun in their hands?

Without going through another thread of “dueling statistics” over gun-related deaths, I call bullshit.

8

Employee in Custody After Stabbing 8 Grocery Store Co-Workers

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A knife-wielding grocery store employee attacked eight co-workers Friday, seriously injuring five before a witness pulled a gun and stopped him, police said.***
I didn’t see Memphis on your list.
My point is, when your cow-orkers are bleeding half to death and the perp is coming at YOU next, you won’t give a rats ass about your silly list. You’ll just want him stopped any way possible. A pistol seems like an excellent tool:
*
“When he turned around and saw my pistol, he threw the knife away, put his hands up and got on the ground,” Cope told The Associated Press. “He saw my gun and that was pretty much it.”*

Yes this is only one case in millions. So what?

9

How many of those murders were committed by people with concealed-carry permits?

Thought so. Your “analysis” means nothing.

10

A high crime rate might encourage people to carry firearms in the first place. As an analogy, I guarantee you that towns where nobody locks their doors have far less crime than cities where everyone uses three deadbolts, an alarm system, and bars on all the windows. I therefore conclude that locks cause burglary.

11

Firstly, concealed-carry laws are generally agreed to be a good measure of how gun-friendly or gun-unfriendly a locality is. If anyone disagrees that this is so, they’re welcome to propose a better measure.

Well, how many possible demographic factors are there? An almost infinite number. So let’s say that you reject my analysis because I didn’t account for race. so then I respond by restricting my study only to white people. You then demand that I account for social class. I restrict my study to poor, white people. You then demand that I account for age. I restrict to poor, white people between the ages of 20 and 30. You demand that I account for gender. I restrict myself to poor,white,males between 20 and 30. You then demand that I account for tongue-curling etc… The end result it that you’ve reduced this to a meaningless exercise. Apply the same logic to any topic, and you’ll end up rejecting every piece of data (in the social science fields).

It’s precisely to address this issue that I took the ten biggest cities in each category. The cities aren’t all identical, but I bet that if you averaged out the ten cities in each category the two categories would look fairly similar. Thus, there’s no reason to believe that any difference in demographics is affecting the outcome, and the difference is large enough that it can’t be statistical random noise. Having established that murderers greatly prefer gun-friendly cities, it’s up to gun supporters to provide an actual alternate explanation, rather than just saying that there might be an alternate explanation.

We’ve debated the theory up and down in a dozen different threads. I started this thread to discuss the fact that private gun ownership correlates with high murder rates. Theoretical reasons why guns should reduce crime rates aren’t much good if you get shot.

Before you go around citing Memphis as a gun-filled, crime-free paradise, you might want to get the facts.

I’m suffering a short-term memory lapse. Remind me again, what’s the plural of annecdote?

12

We have a winner. Gun proliferation doesn’t cause crime. Crime causes gun proliferation.

13

Absolutely, especially for CCW.

14

I doubt it.

But anyway, there’s a very easy way to account for race, class, etc. without getting into endless debate you describe:

Just look at murder rates in the years before and after CCW is enacted. In that way, you know that the demographic profile is roughly the same.

15

Nonsense!

California has concealed carry. In quite a few areas it’s easy to get a permit.
Massachusetts has concealed carry.
Maryland has CCW
Connecticut has concealed carry
Rhode Island has CCW
New York has concealed carry
New Jersey has CCW
Iowa has concealed carry. In many places there it’s quite easy to get a permit.
Minnesota has concealed carry. Shall issue. And had “may issue” before that.
Even Massachusetts has concealed carry.

Every one of these staes has CCW, with thousands of permits issues. None of those states would be called overly gun friendly as all of them have some or many draconian anti-gun, anti-gun owner laws.

The measure of gun friendlyness is a mixture of issues, not just one.

16

I didn’t. I mearly said it wasn’t on the list on your OP.

Guns are everywhere, and every state except Wisconsin, lllinois & the District of Columbia have some form of concealed carry. So the only way you can make your case is if you can show that these are low crime utopias, AND that they are low crime utopias BECAUSE of their lack of concealed carry.

17

Actually a Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruling allows for home owners and businesses to carry concealed on their property, so your down to Ill & DC for no CCW.

How can you prove your case when only 2 places have no CCW our of 51?

18

Although it may be “possible”, technically, to obtain a concealed carry permit, in practice this is not the case for many states or municipalities. Iirc, it was necessary to sue New York
City just to obtain an application; they were not even available to be turned down for everyday serfs. As far as getting it approved, unless you’re connected politically, forget it. The inherent right of self-defense can be expunged as well - I believe it is Massachusetts, birthplace of independence, at which courts have decided the brave citizenry have a “duty to flee” when attacked, even at home. And successfully defending oneself against the riff-raff is about guaranteed to invite a civil lawsuit, if the prosecutor can be held at bay.

19

6 people stabbed, none dead. How many do you think would have died if the perp had a gun instead of a knife?

20

Answer this first:

How many more would he have stabbed and/or killed had he not been stopped by an armed civilian?