There's No Correlation Between Gun Ownership, Mass Shootings, & Murder Rates

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https://mises.org/blog/theres-no-correlation-between-gun-ownership-mass-shootings-and-murder-rates

October 9, 2015Ryan McMaken
While I was fact checking today's Mises Daily article, I checked some correlation coefficients of my own so I didn't have to rely on Volokh's numbers as my only source.
I approached the data a little differently than Volokh did and instead of using a subjective ranking by an organization like the Brady organization, I just looked at the rate of gun ownership in the state. After all, the argument is often that more guns and more gun owners leads to more violence.
So, I looked at the correlation between the gun ownership rate (a percentage on the x axis) and the murder rate (n per 100,000 on the y axis) in each state. The visual result is this:

As you can see, there is no correlation. In fact, if you run the numbers, the correlations coefficient is 0.1, which suggests a negligible correlation, or none at all. The murder data is 2012 data from the Justice Department. The gun ownership rate data is from a 2015 report called "Gun ownership and social gun culture."
Just for good measure, I also went in and looked for a correlation between mass shootings and gun ownership rates. Here, I took the total number of mass shooting victims in all states so far in 2015. This is updated constantly by Mass Shooting Tracker, and includes the most recent Oregon mass shooting. Mass shootings here include a shooting involving 4 or more people, and do not necessarily mean school shooting. They can mean someone went nuts and shot his wife, her lover, and two bystanders at a birthday party when the shooter personally knew all the victims. There are not just cases of random public shootings. If we only included those, the total numbers would be microscopically small. Even with all mass shooting data together, it's obvious that your odds of being involved in one in any given year are vanishingly small, and less than 1 per 100,000 in 48 states. I've included all victims, not just fatalities here. If I used only fatalities, the mass shooting numbers would be much smaller:

There's even less of a correlation here: -0.006.
Now, I've noticed that when someone points out the lack of a correlation here, gun-control advocates are quick to jump in and say "but you didn't control for this" and "you didn't control for that." That's true. But what I do show here is that the situation is much more complicated than one would think from absurd claims like "states with fewer guns have fewer murders" and so on. Apparently, claims that new gun laws are commonsensical can't be true if the relationship between gun laws and murder rates require us to adjust for half a dozen different variables. In fact, by looking at the data, I could imagine any number of other factors that might be more likely a determinant of the murder rate than gun ownership.

 

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previous article, note the point at the end about gun control especially hurting minorities

https://mises.org/library/gun-control-fashionable-prohibition-modern-lawmakers

Gun Control: Fashionable Prohibition for Modern Lawmakers

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October 9, 2015Ryan McMaken
Tags Legal SystemU.S. HistoryValue and Exchange

With the latest school shooting, all humane people are expected to jump up and do something to stop the next shooting. The most popular response among media pundits and national policymakers right now is an expansion of the various prohibitions now in place against guns.

For anyone familiar with the history of prohibitions on inanimate objects, however, these appeals to prohibition as a “common sense” solution are rather less convincing.

Americans and others have tried a wide variety of similar prohibitions before, and with mixed results at best. Nowadays, prohibitions on drugs are in decline as states continue to unravel prohibitions of the past and make the nature of prohibition less drastic and less punitive. And, of course, the prohibition of alcohol has been dead for decades.

The prohibitions of old have been deemed failures. But fortunately for prohibitionists, there’s a fashionable form of modern prohibition that won’t go away.

Why Not Ban Alcohol?
Now, I know what some of you are saying: “Hey, McMaken, you can’t compare alcohol prohibition to gun prohibition because alcohol mostly only hurts the drinker, while guns have many harmful side effects for the public at large.”

But the fact that anyone could think this shows just how well the anti-alcohol-prohibition rhetoric has worked. Since the repeal of prohibition in the 1930s, alcohol has taken on an image of fun and relaxation. Sure, some people use it irresponsibly, we are told, but for the most part, people should be allowed the freedom to use it. For those high risk behaviors linked to alcohol, such as drunk driving, we’ll regulate that, but the ownership of alcohol itself, of course, should be open to all adults.

And yet, in the face of this laissez-faire attitude toward drinking, we could offer a host of illustrations of how alcohol is in fact a public safety menace.

Indeed, prior to the 1920s, during the heyday of the temperance movement, alcohol’s image was as anything but a mere benign luxury among a sizable portion of the population.

While many people today assume that the prohibitionists argued along puritanical lines, and emphasized the dangers of moral ruin, the arguments against alcohol were really far more complex than that.

The prohibitionists argued — quite plausibly, mind you — that any number of social ills could be addressed through alcohol prohibition. Chief among these was the fact that many families, including children, were often rendered destitute by the drinking of the male head of the household who was unable to hold down a job due to his addiction. Moreover, cases of child abuse and spousal abuse were clearly connected to alcohol consumption, as were household accidents and accidents on the job.

When breadwinners were killed or injured on the job, or if a drunk spent half his income at a bar on payday, families often ended up on the local dole. Or worse.

And there was a connection to non-domestic violence too. Public drunkenness, bar fights, and the deadly and irresponsible use of guns were connected to drinking as well.

Ironically, back then though, it wasn’t the guns that were seen as the problem (although gun control advocates did exist). For many, the problem was that drunks were irresponsibly using guns and that the common-sense solution was to prevent them from getting drunk.

Guns are Less Deadly than Alcohol
Nowadays, 88,000 deaths per year are attributed to alcohol abuse, and thirty people per day in the United States die in alcohol-related auto accidents. Heavy drinkers are more prone to violence, suicide, and risky sexual behavior.

In fact, if we compare these statistics, we find that alcohol abuse is significantly more deadly and problematic than misuse of guns. There were 36,000 gun-related deaths (including suicides and accidents) in the US in 2013, and as a percentage of all causes of death, alcohol-related deaths are more than twice as common as gun deaths.

What’s more, one-third of gun deaths are alcohol related. Thus, according to prohibitionist logic, we could eliminate one-third of gun-related deaths overnight by prohibiting alcohol consumption. So why aren’t we doing it? If it could save one life, wouldn’t it be worth it?

Most have concluded that saving one life is not, in fact, worth it. In practice, alcohol-related deaths (including those inflicted against third-party victims) are treated very differently than gun-related deaths.

For example, it is clear that alcohol is a central component in the more than 10,000 drunk-driving deaths that occur each year. So, is the response to restrict certain types of alcohol or populations that can buy it? Are background checks instituted to prevent sales to incorrigible drunk drivers? No, the response is to ban how alcohol is used in certain cases.

On the other hand, in response to the 11,000 gun-related murders per year, the prescribed response is to restrict the guns themselves. But, if we were to apply the same logic behind drunk driving bans to gun violence, the only legislation we would be considering would be something along the lines of special penalties for carrying firearms when mentally impaired, on psychotropic drugs, when sight impaired, or in crowded areas where accidents are more likely to affect bystanders. The mere purchase or ownership of guns would not be restricted, just as the purchase or ownership of alcohol is not restricted in response to drunk driving.

Indeed, if we add to drunk driving all the cases of spousal abuse and child abuse and public cases of assault, bar fights, and more, it becomes clear that alcohol is in fact far more damaging to the social fabric than guns have ever been. Once we factor in the harm that alcohol does to the user himself, in terms of health problems, riskier sex, and suicides, the numbers look even worse for alcohol.

 

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Does Prohibition Work?
Now, you might be thinking, “yes, but if gun prohibition works, shouldn’t we try it?” Unfortunately, there are few reasons to believe that it would work, or that the cure would not be worse than the disease.

Mark Thornton illustrated years ago that alcohol prohibition led to more alcohol consumption, and more consumption of harder distilled drinks versus more mild beer and wine beverages. In addition to the complete failure to end the behavior it targeted, Americans also became acquainted with numerous unpleasant side effects of prohibition including more organized crime and more government harassment of peaceful citizens.

Comparing the States
As far as gun prohibition goes, thanks to a diversity of gun laws among the American states, we can compare between gun ownership levels in the states and homicide rates.

And what we find is that there is no correlation between the level of restrictiveness in gun laws and the murder rate. Most recently, Eugene Volokh ran the numbers looking at homicide rates and the so-called Brady Score assigned to states by gun-control advocates. Volokh even provides the data so you can analyze it yourself. (Volokh explains why homicides and not “gun deaths” is the important metric here.)

We can also see that this is quite plausible by simply eyeballing the data if we look at gun restrictions by state and homicide rates. Gun-control advocates like to point to southern states that have both permissive gun laws and high murder rates, such as Alabama and Mississippi. But, even a cursory analysis beyond this cherry-picking shows that there are numerous states with permissive gun laws (such as Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, and others) where the murder rate is very low. And states with more restrictive laws, such as Illinois, New York, and California have higher murder rates than numerous states where it is easy to buy a gun.

So, while gun-control advocates press for “common-sense” restrictions, real common sense suggests that gun restrictions cannot explain the prevalence of murder in a state. This means that gun-control advocates are looking at the wrong social statistics to explain the violence.

Reasons Why They Want to Ban Guns and Not Alcohol
But none of this matters when gun violence is being exploited to drive for more state power and more regulation of private citizens. Many gun-control advocates really do believe that government regulation and management can solve every social ill. They ignore the realities behind failed experiments such as alcohol prohibition or the war on drugs, and instead move on to the latest sexy prohibitionist drive because they sense an opportunity to control one more aspect of daily life.

Most everyone accepts that prohibition creates unintended consequences that can be negative, and with alcohol prohibition, these consequences included organized crime and the criminalization of peaceful citizens. Gun-control advocates assert, however, that whatever the downsides of gun control may be, they are minimal compared to the many advantages.

As Murray Rothbard pointed out in For a New Liberty, whether or not you come face to face with those down sides ban depend a lot on your wealth and influence within society. For example, white, middle class people who live in safe suburbs, have influence over local police forces, and can even resort to private security (including alarm systems) see little down side to gun control. After all, they have little reason to fear police or common criminals when they can exercise their well-established political influence at the local level or purchase a home security system with the expectation that police will arrive quickly in case of emergency.

Powerless minorities, on the other hand, face much larger downsides to gun control. For them, police are an unreliable deterrent to local crime, and are little use in cases of social unrest. Many may remember how police in Ferguson, Missouri protected government buildings, but left the rest of the town on its own during the riots there. Local citizens paid for police protection, but got none. And then, of course, there are countless cases of the “proper” authorities using their legal guns against powerless populations, with no resource left to them other than private firearms. Just one example would be the Texas Ranger rampages that followed the so-called Plan de San Diego when the Rangers swept through southern Texas lynching Mexican-Americans who were deemed traitors.

Consequently, some principled leftists, most of whom are radicals, do not subscribe to the dominant gun-control position of the left. But certainly the mainline left, dominated by university intellectuals, government employees, and politicos with nice houses in safe neighborhoods, see few problems associated with centralizing coercive power in the hands of “official” law enforcement.

The downsides of restricting alcohol, however, are plentiful for those who spend many hours at cocktail parties and send their children to booze-soaked elite universities to be paired up with the appropriate social class.

So, until this changes, we ought not expect much of a change in the double standard applied to alcohol and guns in terms of violence, health, and safety. The people who make the laws are quite happy having plenty of booze around. But they can afford to pay someone else to handle the guns for them.

 

[UncleBuck]

mises.org?

why did that republican lie machine omit every other nation on earth with gun control and no neverending series of gun massacres?

 

[heckler73]

I would point out the anomaly of Louisiana.
WTF is going on there?
One could break up the study, further, by looking at quintiles, and their underlying factors (such as income, employment, disease, etc.).

 

[squarepush3r]

mises.org?

why did that republican lie machine omit every other nation on earth with gun control and no neverending series of gun massacres?

Buck, this study just showed that gun control specifically hurts minorities, since they are in poor neighborhoods with no police protection, and are not allowed to protect themselves or their properties.

So basically, why do you hate minorities?

 

[UncleBuck]

Buck, this study just showed that gun control specifically hurts minorities, since they are in poor neighborhoods with no police protection, and are not allowed to protect themselves or their properties.

So basically, why do you hate minorities?

when was the last gun massacre in australia?

 

[squarepush3r]

when was the last gun massacre in australia?

This type of argument is a fallacy, since you can pick out other countries with full gun control, with very high murder rates (Jamaica/Venezuela come to mind). Also, you can pick countries with strong gun control with very low murder rates (Australia/Japan). Looking at a global perspective, there does not seem to be any correlation overall to countries gun laws/murder rates.

However, you should note that this argument is NOT in favor of more guns! Since the data shows that guns states aren't necessarily safer than more restricted gun states as far as murders, it is more of a neutral stance. So I think from this objective data, we can start to look into other areas to find out what is causing the murders/gun violence. Lets find the real reason the people behind these attacks are acting out. Is it guns/video games/movies/music/psychological meds/mental illness/financial inequality/etc? Or a sign of a sicker society that we try to mask up by placing the blame on an object.

 

[god1]

This type of argument is a fallacy, since you can pick out other countries with full gun control, with very high murder rates (Jamaica/Venezuela come to mind). Also, you can pick countries with strong gun control with very low murder rates (Australia/Japan). Looking at a global perspective, there does not seem to be any correlation overall to countries gun laws/murder rates.

However, you should note that this argument is NOT in favor of more guns! Since the data shows that guns states aren't necessarily safer than more restricted gun states as far as murders, it is more of a neutral stance. So I think from this objective data, we can start to look into other areas to find out what is causing the murders/gun violence. Lets find the real reason the people behind these attacks are acting out. Is it guns/video games/movies/music/psychological meds/mental illness/financial inequality/etc? Or a sign of a sicker society that we try to mask up by placing the blame on an object.

Out of curiosity, why do engage in these silly discussions with these stupid people?

Guns aren't responsible for any crime, people are. Start off with that conversation. If you don't get agreement then you know you're wasting your time.

Meaningful solutions only occur once the problem has been correctly and clearly defined.

 

[UncleBuck]

This type of argument is a fallacy

it wasn't an argument, it was a question. one that destroys this entire silly cherrypicked "study" from a GOP lie machine.

Lets find the real reason the people behind these attacks are acting out. Is it guns/video games/movies/music/psychological meds/mental illness/financial inequality/etc?

other nations have mentally ill people and video games, but stricter gun control and no massacres.

amazing how that works, eh?

 

[UncleBuck]

Guns aren't responsible for any crime, people are.

then why do people who want to massacre other people use guns instead of baseball bats or large rocks?

Meaningful solutions only occur once the problem has been correctly and clearly defined.

it already has been, it's guns.

england has strict gun control and a gun homicide rate of 0.26 per 100,000. we have next to no gun control and a rate of over 10 gun homicides per 100,000.

australia had a gun massacre, passed gun control laws, and have not had another gun massacre in two decades.

imagine that, eh?

 

[OddBall1st]

Out of curiosity, why do engage in these silly discussions with these stupid people?

Guns aren't responsible for any crime, people are. Start off with that conversation. If you don't get agreement then you know you're wasting your time.

Meaningful solutions only occur once the problem has been correctly and clearly defined.

In the same token, that gun give those people the opportunity to do what they otherwise could not, such as rob a group of three for example.
The other side of that coin is people carrying a gun are less likely to be robbed.

Selling guns at shows to just anybody that claims them stolen only to sell them on the streets is a common occurrence that needs to be controlled,...

 

[OddBall1st]

then why do people who want to massacre other people use guns instead of baseball bats or large rocks?



it already has been, it's guns.

england has strict gun control and a gun homicide rate of 0.26 per 100,000. we have next to no gun control and a rate of over 10 gun homicides per 100,000.

australia had a gun massacre, passed gun control laws, and have not had another gun massacre in two decades.

imagine that, eh?

Both those total populations are about the same as just our East coast. Opportunity and easy, soft targets are all over the US, that`s why so much happens by so little.

 

[UncleBuck]

Both those total populations are about the same as just our East coast. Opportunity and easy, soft targets are all over the US, that`s why so much happens by so little.

there are opportunity and easy targets all over the world, but only we have gun massacres every week or month.

 

[god1]

there are opportunity and easy targets all over the world, but only we have gun massacres every week or month.

Why do you refuse to admit that the crux of the problem are people?

What is worse the weapon or human in the following situations:
Human kills 20 in less than 30 sec
Human kills 30 over a period of 2 years
Human kills 45 over a 4 year period
Human kills 10 over a10 year period

 

[abandonconflict]

Not a study, not peer reviewed, just Mises.org bullshit propaganda.

Guns don't kill people, gun owners kill people.

 

[potroastV2]

My version is:

guns don't kill people, pigs kill people.

 

[UncleBuck]

Why do you refuse to admit that the crux of the problem are people?

What is worse the weapon or human in the following situations:
Human kills 20 in less than 30 sec
Human kills 30 over a period of 2 years
Human kills 45 over a 4 year period
Human kills 10 over a10 year period

why do people who massacre large numbers of other people invariably choose guns to commit massacres?

 

[schuylaar]

when was the last gun massacre in australia?

although there was that cray cray serial murder of nurses a while back..

 

[schuylaar]

Not a study, not peer reviewed, just Mises.org bullshit propaganda.

Guns don't kill people, gun owners kill people.

more preschoolers are now killed by guns in america annually than cops while on duty.

pretty sobering statistic.

always wondered whether my husband would come home every time he went to work..never had to think about my kids.