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Less guns = more violence: Harvard Study
- KyleBrandt 13y ago"With increased firearm regulations you find an increase in violent crime." Is there some control for the possibility that those areas enacted firearm regulations due to already having a lot of violent crime? Edit: It is addressed in the linked to document: "But the more plausible explanation for many nations having widespread gun ownership with low violence is that these nations never had high murder and violence rates and so never had occasion to enact severe anti‐gun laws. On the other hand, in nations that have ex‐perienced high and rising violent crime rates, the legislative reaction has generally been to enact increasingly severe antigun laws" - (Bottom of Pg. 672)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Pxtl 13y agoShould be obvious. Violent areas need to create more laws to control the violence. Peaceful areas don't need to tell their citizens not to have guns. See also http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-03-03/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-03-03/
- ctdonath 13y agoThe point is those additional laws don't control the violence. Good/law-abiding/upstanding armed citizens, however, do.
- GVIrish 13y agoI think armed citizens can be a tenuous curb on violence but that still wouldn't solve the roots of violence. A civilized society with low levels of poverty, good economic mobility, a good education system, a fair and effective judicial system and no drug war would mean there'd be less people committing violent acts in the first place. When you're at the point where an armed citizen has to regularly thwart crime, you probably have major unresolved socioeconomic problems. Not that I'm against a citizen's right to bear arms. Just saying that the goal should be to have less people motivated to commit crimes in the first place, not a bunch of would be criminals calculating whether or not they're going to encounter armed resistance.
- VBprogrammer 13y agoI'd love to see a citation for that. Maybe its just the sad fact that bad news tends to travel more widely but I have yet to hear (on UK news) of a situation were an honest law abiding citizen has stopped a tragedy. I realize that their very intervention may have stopped a tragedy, making it not news worthy but I'm sure there should be more instances to justify that argument.
- dllthomas 13y agoSomeone recently stopped a bank robbery in Michigan. I'm actually not sure whether intervention was wise, but the outcome was good - no one injured, thief arrested. http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/06/customer_foils_bank_robbery_at.html http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/06/customer_foils_ba...
- GVIrish 13y agoWell in the UK law-abiding citizens can't arm themselves so you'll never hear that story. The law in the UK even goes so far as to prohibit citizens from carrying an 'offensive weapon' without a good reason. So if you happened to be walking down the street with a knife and you were not a chef on the way to work, you could be arrested.
- hga 13y agoEven using "more force" than the assailant is illegal. Even if both are examples of deadly force, e.g gun v. knife. Done by the courts in the '50s, the Parliament in the '60s, so even the habits of self-defense are a distant memory.
- lupatus 13y agoHere's one instance: http://www.azcentral.com/news/free/20121218flagstaff-gun-toting-good-samaritan-bank-robbery.html http://www.azcentral.com/news/free/20121218flagstaff-gun-tot...
- hga 13y agoIt happens an estimated 2.25 million times a year in the US. Needless to say, the vast majority of these involve neither the gun being fired or publicity. My favorite independent site was taken out by the Righthaven copyright trolls, but you can start with this: http://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/armed-citizen.aspx http://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/armed-citizen.aspx ; each item is from the media.
- superuser2 13y agoThis study is not evidence that armed citizens control violence, just that areas with less of a violence problem don't feel a need to enact gun control.
- darkarmani 13y ago> Good/law-abiding/upstanding armed citizens, however, do. If your area is filled with good law-abiding citizens, you probably have lower crime rates.
- chris_wot 13y agoOh, so peaceful areas don't have guns?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- greesil 13y agoAnd correlation is still causation!
- Pxtl 13y agoIn this case, it is causation. Just not in the direction the gun advocates would like to think. Gun violence causes gun control laws, not the other way around.
- bostik 13y agoHaving skimmed the paper over, I'd like to quote this parapgraph, running from end of page 16 and rolling over to page 17. Once again, we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun control _causes_ nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit handgun ownership. Rather, we assert a political causation for the observed correlation that nations with stringent gun controls tend to have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns. The political causation is that nations which have violence problems tend to adopt severe gun controls, but these do not reduce violence, which is determined by basic socio‐cultural and economic factors. Stringent gun control policies tend to appear in nations and/or regions where violence is already a problem. This study merely underlines the futility of any single tunnel-visioned policy - people who are willing to commit murder, are also willing to expend effort to find any weapon(s) to allow them to proceed in their endeavours. Here in Finland, we have quite a few weapons, but they are rarely used in violent crimes. This nation tends to favour bladed weapons in their homicides: knives, axes and other things that are easy to pick up and use in drunken anger.
- cpncrunch 13y agoAt least with knives and axes you have some chance to run away.
- lupatus 13y agoThrowing knives, throwing axes? And, the grandparent commenter's comment duly considered, I still wouldn't easily dismiss a Finn's ability to use guns to kill people; see the White Death[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
- ctdonath 13y agoThrowing a knife/axe to useful effect is difficult enough with a stationary target under calm conditions. The number of people able to do so with malice under high stress at a moving target is vanishingly small.
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- cpncrunch 13y agoLooks like they are cherrypicking data to prove their pet theory. A couple of points: - Legally held guns in England are generally owned by farmers, collectors and hunters. Those people predominantly live in rural areas, where crime is low. High rates of homicide generally occur in cities using illegal guns. So naturally you will see a negative correlation between LEGAL guns and violence. However it isn't the gun control legislation that is causing the increase in violence (LOL). In fact if you allowed teenagers in the shitty housing estates to legally own guns, I suspect you'd have a lot more homicides. - Compare Canada to the USA. We have 1/3 of the legally held guns you have, and about 1/3rd of the homicide rate.
- GVIrish 13y agoThe Harvard study unequivocally does not say that gun control legislation causes the increased violence, nor does the linked blog post. The Harvard study is simply stating that murder rates are not appreciably affected by gun control legislation, and that the big drivers of violence are socioeconomic.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> The Harvard study Contrary to the headline (here and of the blog post), there is no Harvard study involved. If you can call the paper a study (which is, I think, somewhat dubious -- that implies a structured analysis or meta-analysis, which this is not) by two non-Harvard-affiliated scholars (one of which is affiliated with a right-wing think tank) published a student-run publication out of Harvard that bills itself as "the nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship."
- cpncrunch 13y agoI didn't say that it did. I'm simply pointing out that there isn't even a correlation. The "study" is basically pro-gun crap.
- lwhalen 13y agoAnd at a population of roughly 35 million people to the USA's 319 million, you have a tenth of the population too.
- ctdonath 13y agoRemove just four cities from US homicide rates and the USA drops from one of the highest on the per-capita murder list to one of the lowest. Interestingly, those cities also have the highest level of gun control.
- 67726e 13y agoThe question then becomes do those cities have tight gun control because of or in spite of the high rate of gun crimes?
- ctdonath 13y agoConsidering that those cities have what amount to complete bans on gun possession, it's "in spite of." Total prohibition doesn't work.
- ladon86 13y ago...in a country which only has small islands of total prohibition surrounded by a sea of millions of available guns.
- ctdonath 13y agoCocaine and other imported hard drugs are easily available nationwide despite total national prohibition and a militaristic level of governmental opposition to importation. Take all the guns away, and demand will find a supply nonetheless.
- anologwintermut 13y agoYeah, we'd have trouble cracking down on people growing Glock's in fields or manufacturing AR's from scratch with stuff they bought from CVS. And it would be impossible to stop gun's from being imported from Latin American with it's renowned industrial base for manufacturing firearms.
- dsizzle 13y agoNote the title of the article in the link has changed (after a comment there) to "more gun regulation correlates to more violence", which is quite a bit different from less guns correlate to more violence (the current title here).
- lutusp 13y agoYes -- it's grammatically correct, and this title isn't.
- dsizzle 13y agoWell, the tacit assumption that "more gun control" means "fewer guns" is a more substantive problem. I think other "Harvard studies" (Hemenway) show, in fact, that fewer guns correlate with LESS homicide. http://nyti.ms/142rOJe http://nyti.ms/142rOJe
- lutusp 13y agoShifting topics away from grammar for a moment, it's unfortunate that these issues can't really be studied scientifically. The result is that people can take the existing data and twist it to suit any conclusion. Most European countries have fewer guns or no guns, and much lower levels of violence. But then, they're different people with different values -- the role of guns in their societies might be an effect, not a cause.
- robobenjie 13y agoAnother way to put it: Places with high violence tend to adopt more gun control. When stated that way this study's findings sound obvious.
- lutusp 13y ago> Less guns = more violence: Harvard Study "Less guns"? No one at Harvard would dare write such an ungrammatical headline -- this had to be the work of the submitter. And it is. http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-less/ http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-l...
- VikingCoder 13y agoRemoving bullets from people causes violent crime. Look, we can statistically show that everywhere someone has tried to do something about people getting injured with guns, there is more violent gun crime! We must stop these surgeons! Clearly, by trying to help, they're causing the problem! </sarcasm> <logicalFallacyReference name="post hoc ergo propter hoc" />
- onebaddude 13y agoDon't assume that everyone, especially Harvard researchers, are as ignorant of statistics, correlation and causation as you appear to be. Their intention and conclusion is clear in the paper. They aren't making any bold, ridiculous claims.
- VikingCoder 13y agoFirst, "as you appear to be." Where did that come from? Do you have any basis for that thought, or do you just enjoy typing angry words that sound good to you? Second, the Hacker News article headline is, "Less guns = more violence." That is an absolute declaration of causation. The linked article makes this assertion without any backing: And enacting legislation without proper evidence supporting that it will have the desired effects can actually result in, as these studies show, the complete opposite. The study does not show that. In fact: we are not arguing that the data in Table 2 shows that gun control _causes_ nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit handgun ownership. As close as they get in the report: these [laws] do not reduce violence, While the linked article claims that they increase violence. TL;DR: The linked article makes false claims about what the report says, and the Hacker News article headline is just as bad or worse.
- TausAmmer 13y agoYou can't ban stupid people by law. Or there isn't one that succeed yet.
- bsbechtel 13y agoHere is a thought experiment: You are someone who is considering committing a crime. Let's say a robbery of a convenience store. You already own a gun. It doesn't matter how you acquired your gun, you already have it. You now have the choice of where to commit your crime. You can commit that crime in an area where it is illegal to own a firearm, and your victim will very likely not be able to defend himself, or you can commit that crime in an area where your victim can legitimately own a crime, and may shoot you if you try to rob him. Where do you choose to commit your crime?
- mef 13y agoHow plausible is it that enough people cross state or country borders in order to rob convenience stores to make a difference in the measured violent crime rates?
- hga 13y agoI can say that friends residing in Washington, D.C. told me it happens a lot, and cited specific crimes near their residences. Particularly from Virginia, which is correctly assumed to have a lot of gun owners, and since sometime in the '90s more than a few concealed carry licensees.
- bmelton 13y agoHonestly, I'd say it's fairly likely. DOJ reports and CJIS statistics have pointed out that criminals, by and large, prefer their would-be victims to be unarmed, and will actively seek out targets they believe to be unarmed. This is likely the reason that the Aurora shooter went 20 miles out of his way, passing both the closest theater to his home, and the largest theater in range, to perform his assault at the one theater in the (otherwise gun-loving) Aurora, Colorado area that specifically banned guns. This is also a potentially contributing factor as to why a majority of mass murders are committed in areas labeled "gun free zones", like schools, college campuses, Fort Hood, etc.
- darkarmani 13y ago> This is also a potentially contributing factor as to why a majority of mass murders are committed in areas labeled "gun free zones", like schools, college campuses, Fort Hood, etc. Aren't those areas that are labeled "gun free zones" because it's easy to commit mass murder there? It's not the signage that makes it happen.
- gingersnap 13y agoPost hoc ergo propter hoc.
- dubcanada 13y agoI really hate random people taking an article and twisting it for there own link bait. No where in this study does it say that "less guns" equals "more violence". All it says is that areas with high violence (irregardless of guns, this also does not take into account the % of those murders that happen due to guns) have high gun control. This article also does not take into account areas in Africa, and the Middle East and instead focuses on Europe, which is greatly swayed due to the high level of murders in Russia. This article should be called "In Europe More Guns != More Violence".
- frakkingcylons 13y agoWhat makes the title more absurd than usual (regardless of if it's been edited or not) is that the final paragraph of the post emphasizes that complex systems of society can't be boiled down to simplistic relationships. Such as "less guns == more violence" or vice versa.
- rasengan0 13y agoGee,I hope there is no bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Research_Institute
- known 13y ago'Diverse society will fail' --Robert Putnam. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
- dragonwriter 13y agoIts not a "Harvard study", its a study by people with no affiliation with Harvard published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Polic, which isn't a scientific journal but a Harvard Law student-run publication that bills itself as "The nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship." Its also not a structured analysis (or meta-analysis), but a polemic with footnotes.