Some facts about guns in the US

The Brady score of "gun law strength" for the top most violent states averages 9.4 out of 100. (using your violent death map and the Brady website map.)
The Brady score for the least violent states averages 17.7 out of 100.

Almost a factor of two difference.

(Correlation does not indicate causation, of course. But the above disproves the assertion that state gun laws increase the odds of violent death within a state.)

 

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You're trusting a site with a vested interest. Not smart. In fact it is downright lazy. Do you independant research with a agency with mo political agenda in this. Then you MIGHT have an argument.

But here is the gun owners point why are they being punished for the wrongdoing of other people. If someone in your neighborhood was electricuting people why should your power be turned off? If someone else is speeding why should I be told I can't have a specific car? if someone drinks and drives do they suddenly make alcohol or cars illegal? What if some people went on stabbing sprees are steak knives suddenly illegal? No to all of these. What makes a gun any different?

 

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Looking directly at the five most violent and five least violent, with DC counted as a "State", I see no reason to revise my original observation. I do not know how the Brady score is derived - perhaps the problem is in the word "average"? - but clearly Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire and Iowa and North Dakota all have less restrictive gun control laws than Maryland and DC, and no more restrictive in general than Louisiana, Alabama, or Mississippi.

Compare for yourself.

 

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Which site is that?

The Brady Campaign has a vested interest in accurately ranking states by gun law severity so they can push for more gun laws in states that do not have as many of them. Note that I did NOT get the final scores from them. If you think I did, you didn't read the post.

The other source (violent deaths per state) was posted by Iceaura.

The same reason drivers are "punished" for the wrongdoing of drunk drivers.
The same reason Internet posters are "punished" by the actions of spammers and trolls.
The same reason pilots are "punished" for the wrongdoings of hijackers.

It shouldn't. But it would sure make sense to take a look at who buys electric chairs. Maybe even ask them why they're buying one. Or if there rare hundreds of thousands of electrocutions a year, start registering electric chairs.

It shouldn't. But you might be told that your car has to have brakes, a horn and a seatbelt. (o the horror)

Nope. But they might make drinking and driving illegal. Perhaps require you to register your car and get a driver's license - then take away that license if you get caught drunk driving too many times. Maybe even have sobriety checkpoints (just to "punish" sober drivers of course.)

Nope. But it might get harder to buy a 12 inch "steak knife" with a blood groove.

It's not. See above. No one is proposing outlawing guns.

 

No. I did not use the Brady scores for any averages, just for the ranking of states with strict vs lax gun laws. I used your site for the stats for violent death, then correlated the two.

I agree, though; if you look at just the top five and add DC you see the opposite correlation, primarily because you are skipping Hawaii (which is very low in violence and has a lot of gun laws) and are adding DC (which is not a state and passes laws in a very different manner from states.)

I did! And the more states you use in your averages the more clear the correlation is.

 

Any ranking that fails to agree with the plain facts posted - the actual laws, described and right there to observe - is problematic. Any ranking that did agree with those facts would also agree with the simple observation - the bottom five States in violent death have significantly less strict gun laws without exception, the top five in violent death include at least one State - Maryland - with significantly stricter gun laws. Two if one includes DC, which of course one should, as it is full of US citizens and has both its own gun laws and violent deaths.

If you drop DC from the table (I didn't "add" it, it was right there) for some reason (your reason makes no sense - the manner in which the laws were passed is irrelevant here), and expand the example size to include Hawaii (Hawaii was not "skipped" - I chose five on each end because it came out to the extreme 10% on each end, which would be the source of greatest statistical significance), you still have no visible positive correlation between gun law severity and violent death rates. That contradicts your assertion, and supports mine.

I'm ignoring the still visible negative correlation, because I don't think gun laws actually correlate with non-gun violent death at all, in either direction - I think the negative correlation visible is an artifact of cultural features of the US population (the authoritarian hangover from the Confederacy and racism, the Asian influence in Hawaii, the farming and hunting and trapping practices of the near-Canadian States, and so forth).

That would be you, not me, using "averages"; you, not me, relying on dubious numerical scores for gun law severity that do not appear to match descriptions of the actual laws.

I'm using rank correlation, conservatively and prudently restricted to the extremes of what is in the middle a pretty subjective ranking system not suitable for fine discrimination. (The precision of the Brady "score" as you post it is reason enough for automatic rejection of its validity, even if it didn't fail to match observation of the data.)

The only correlation between gun law severity and overall violent death that is visible from ranking the actual gun laws themselves is negative. Expanding the rank sample to include the less statistically significant muddles the issue (it becomes much more difficult to rank the States in the middle), but we can easily see that places like California and Illinois and the rest of the Western States like Utah are going to reinforce, not invert, the strong initial pattern.

 

Agreed. And again, that is due to the sample size you chose. Increase it to ten and you see the opposite trend.

Because we were talking about states. DC is not a state. Again, you can add it if you need to make your stats say what you want them to. You could call it "ranking by states and a district."

Yep. And prudently narrowing your selection criteria to ensure you get the result you want.

 

No, you don't. You see a dilution of the significance of what remains the same rank order correlation, and continues to contradict your assertion.

(Actually, I did that in the first post on this tangent, bottom of page 11 - I pointed out that even expanding the sample size to 40%, ten at each end, you still have only one example of strict gun law/low violent death, vs at least two of strict gun law/high violent death: Hawaii; DC and Maryland at least. Correlation still negative)

No, we are talking about the influence of gun laws on violent death rates in the US. DC is a large and well bounded region with its own residents, gun laws, and violent crime rates. It was included in both of the tables I compared and linked, right along with the States, and I saw no reason to go out of my way to exclude it.

The fact that choosing the most significant and clearest and most easily ranked extremes yields strong evidence that contradicts your assertions is just something you have to deal with - it's not a problem with the method.

I used 20% of the total sample, the 10% on each end.

 

OK. I just went back and used 100% of the sample - all 50 states.

The most dangerous 25 states had a Brady average score of 13.5 - indicating that the Brady campaign thinks they do a poor job of gun control based on state laws.
The least dangerous 25 states had a Brady average score of 18.6 - indicating that the Brady campaign thinks they do a better job of gun control based on state laws.

If you like I will go back and add DC. Since the Brady campaign does not rank DC, you'll have to suggest what score you would give them. (Scale of 0 to 100, 0 being Alaska, 100 being Hawaii.)

 

Whereas I avoided using dubious and poorly supported interest group "scores", and certainly did not go to the absurdity of averaging them - Christ, you probably didn't even correct for population size.

I directly compared the per capita violent death rates with the gun laws in force. You can do the same.

I'm beginning to think even less of this Brady score bushwa - they haven't scored the most violent legally defined gun control region in the country? The region whose gun laws have been in the news more often than any others except maybe New York's?

 

you know the guy quoting a researcher basicly mocked of the scientific community for manufacturing evidence probably shouldn't by complain about dubious sources

 

they don't

 

without accounting for other factors than guns. so before you go all being morally supierior your argument was as statisticlly invalid as his.

 

??? Neither did you, but still claimed your use of the same lack of correction in a smaller sample size resulted in the " . . . greatest statistical significance." Can't have it both ways.

How do you rate "gun laws?" Is a law that requires you to register your guns equivalent to a law that requires gun ranges to have hearing protection available? Do you just add all gun laws together and use the sum? Which standard do you use?

The Brady standard applies weights to each kind of law. For example, a law that requires background checks on all gun sales scores a 17, whereas a law that requires gun shops to maintain sales records for some amount of time scores a 2. Thus more onerous laws result in a higher score for that state. Here's the criteria if you are interested:

http://www.bradycampaign.org/stategunlaws/scorecard-descriptions?s=1

No, because they scored by state, not by "region." However, as I said, I will let you score DC however you like and re-calculate the averages if you like.

So the answer is - no, now that it's apparent that the result is not to your liking, you will abandon the entire exercise.

I generally find it more illuminating to let the data inform my opinions, as opposed to the converse.

 

For the third or fourth time: I wasn't averaging anything, or numerically scoring anything. The violence data I posted is already corrected per capita. Nothing I did is vulnerable in that way. I really shouldn't have to repeat that any more.

Exactly the problem with trying to rank the middle of the pack there - might be how the Brady score gets so far from observation and data.

The most strict and the least strict are reasonably clear, and the general category is visible, but that's as far as I think a reasonable person can get. The fact that the clear, easy, and robust category assessment I used - the 10% extremes, expanded to the 20% extremes when you insisted on picking up Hawaii to little effect - apparently conflicts with the Brady score (I'm taking your word for that, haven't checked) casts considerable doubt on that score. That's a pretty big and robust feature to lose.

Well that's stupid and uninformative, explains where the bs is coming from, and no I'm not interested.

More idiocy - DC is fully equivalent to a State as far as gun laws are concerned, and failure to score it opens a pretty big hole in their data - DC has been at the center of twenty or thirty years of national public debate on State level handgun laws etc.

My opinion of this scoring and averaging has been clear for a while now, and justified with some argument over multiple posts. In the absence of any response by you relevant to that fact, I'm going to accept concession in that matter.

The Brady score is not data, it's piss poor analysis. Averaging Brady scores does not yield data, but further confusion in the analysis. My posts of descriptions of the actual laws, and my posts of the violent death rates per capita, are data, and I used them without altering them in the slightest - threw nothing out, added nothing in, direct rank category comparison.

 

Found some stuff I thought I would post... I feel safer.


http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/gun-ownership-among-us-women-climbs

http://m.juneauempire.com/outdoors/2011-10-21/floyd-dryden-6th-graders-learn-gun-safety

 

there isn't a negative correlation. for their to be correlation they would have had to increased gun control scrictness and had gun violence go up which zero research has ever shown. the national academy of sciences has shown there is either no correlation between gun control and gun violance or a mild postive correlation. your entire argument is based from wanting gun control to be bad and not from facts or logic. a simple pairing between the 2 sets says nothing.

 

Well the most recent analysis of that study has shown that he was indeed correct and their mocking was unjustified. The problem with searching for ways to counter an argument is that some sides forget to check to see if anyone else has countered their counter. I actually checked everything out and Lott was upheld by independent research and analysis a little over five years ago. Since then the people who have claimed Lott was wrong have not tried to refute the newer research and the analysis of their errors.

 

Yet Gun Control Advocates would use similar tactics. Comparing countries with liberal gun ownership vs countries that outlaw the weapon. Then they cherry pick their data wanting only to compare just gun related homicides and almost always use totals instead of the rate per hundred.


Why does your right to feel comfortable outweigh my right to choose how I defend myself?