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Looks 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

Looks 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 ago
The 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 ago
  I 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 ago
And at a population of roughly 35 million people to the USA's 319 million, you have a tenth of the population too.
- cpncrunch 13y ago
  I was talking about the homicide rate per population (which you would realise if you had actually looked at the data).
cpncrunch 13y ago
Also interesting that I've had two downvotes for this. You know, you're not meant to downvote something you don't like. I'm assuming that is the reason, as there are no comments with valid arguments against my comment (and even the invalid replies didn't have enough karma to downvote). I can only assume there are some anonymous gun-nuts on HN. If I've said something incorrect, feel free to comment.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Downvotes because you're saying the article is wrong, then make assertions which are in line with the article's conclusion. BTW: there a LOT of not-anonymous gun-nuts on HN.
  - cpncrunch 13y ago
    I just read the article's conclusion, and it's just says "more gun control != fewer deaths". My comment is saying that their data is wrong (or cherrypicked) and their attempt to disprove any correlation doesn't hold water. What I would expect to see would be a scatter graph showing all the countries in the world with guns on one axis and homicides on the other axis - that would make the article a bit more scientific rather than just cherrypicking a few countries. Most of their argument seems to be based on the fact that Russia has a high homicide rate and they have banned handguns. However we all know that Russia has law and order issues. EDIT: I just did a quick search, and it seems there are graphs of homicides vs gun ownership for all countries, e.g. http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/07/doing-math-guns http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/07/doing-math-guns So it certainly does look like gun ownership isn't correlated to homicide rates. However that doesn't necessarily mean that gun control is a bad idea. Does gun control reduce homicides when you control for other factors? The article is arguing that it does not, but my argument is that Canada vs USA shows that it does.
beren0250 13y ago
Gun laws vary state to state, so that doesn't really tell us the whole story. Look at these numbers, all per 100,000 from 2006: Canada - 1.9 States with cities that have VERY strict gun laws: Illinois - 6.1 Michigan - 7.1 Louisiana - 12.4 (!) States with lax gun laws: Montana - 1.8 Idaho - 2.5 North Dakota - 1.3 Now, admittedly, I cherry picked those to prove a point that you can blur the numbers to show what you want them to show, and I can just as easily pick numbers from strict gun law states with really low numbers and states with historically lax laws with higher numbers. We could go back and forth all day long like that, but I think that this paper, or whatever it is does make a pretty valid point which is that gun control doesn't really have the desired effect. Whether you look at entire countries, or individual states or municipalities, you will always find examples of strict gun laws with lots of violence, and no gun laws with almost no violence, and vice versa. We really just need to take a step back and realize that we are coming at this violence problem the wrong way and that the time, energy, and money we keep using to push for tighter gun control, is all wasted on something that likely would not work, and we're taking all those resources away from research we should be doing to find a real solution to the problem. Links for the numbers I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...
- beren0250 13y ago
  Also, that first link has numbers for Canadian provinces, but I have no idea if they have individual gun laws, or what the story is there, so I just left it alone. All the numbers seem pretty low there and they all seem pretty close(except for Nunavat, which is 6.5 but that's probably because the pop is only 32,000), so I just left it as one number for all of Canada for comparison.

GVIrish 13y ago

The 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 ago
I 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 ago

And at a population of roughly 35 million people to the USA's 319 million, you have a tenth of the population too.

cpncrunch 13y ago
I was talking about the homicide rate per population (which you would realise if you had actually looked at the data).

cpncrunch 13y ago

Also interesting that I've had two downvotes for this. You know, you're not meant to downvote something you don't like. I'm assuming that is the reason, as there are no comments with valid arguments against my comment (and even the invalid replies didn't have enough karma to downvote). I can only assume there are some anonymous gun-nuts on HN. If I've said something incorrect, feel free to comment.

ctdonath 13y ago
Downvotes because you're saying the article is wrong, then make assertions which are in line with the article's conclusion. BTW: there a LOT of not-anonymous gun-nuts on HN.
- cpncrunch 13y ago
  I just read the article's conclusion, and it's just says "more gun control != fewer deaths". My comment is saying that their data is wrong (or cherrypicked) and their attempt to disprove any correlation doesn't hold water. What I would expect to see would be a scatter graph showing all the countries in the world with guns on one axis and homicides on the other axis - that would make the article a bit more scientific rather than just cherrypicking a few countries. Most of their argument seems to be based on the fact that Russia has a high homicide rate and they have banned handguns. However we all know that Russia has law and order issues. EDIT: I just did a quick search, and it seems there are graphs of homicides vs gun ownership for all countries, e.g. http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/07/doing-math-guns http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/07/doing-math-guns So it certainly does look like gun ownership isn't correlated to homicide rates. However that doesn't necessarily mean that gun control is a bad idea. Does gun control reduce homicides when you control for other factors? The article is arguing that it does not, but my argument is that Canada vs USA shows that it does.

beren0250 13y ago

Gun laws vary state to state, so that doesn't really tell us the whole story. Look at these numbers, all per 100,000 from 2006: Canada - 1.9 States with cities that have VERY strict gun laws: Illinois - 6.1 Michigan - 7.1 Louisiana - 12.4 (!) States with lax gun laws: Montana - 1.8 Idaho - 2.5 North Dakota - 1.3 Now, admittedly, I cherry picked those to prove a point that you can blur the numbers to show what you want them to show, and I can just as easily pick numbers from strict gun law states with really low numbers and states with historically lax laws with higher numbers. We could go back and forth all day long like that, but I think that this paper, or whatever it is does make a pretty valid point which is that gun control doesn't really have the desired effect. Whether you look at entire countries, or individual states or municipalities, you will always find examples of strict gun laws with lots of violence, and no gun laws with almost no violence, and vice versa. We really just need to take a step back and realize that we are coming at this violence problem the wrong way and that the time, energy, and money we keep using to push for tighter gun control, is all wasted on something that likely would not work, and we're taking all those resources away from research we should be doing to find a real solution to the problem. Links for the numbers I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...

beren0250 13y ago
Also, that first link has numbers for Canadian provinces, but I have no idea if they have individual gun laws, or what the story is there, so I just left it alone. All the numbers seem pretty low there and they all seem pretty close(except for Nunavat, which is 6.5 but that's probably because the pop is only 32,000), so I just left it as one number for all of Canada for comparison.