The Wardman Wire

Kevin Yuill has published an argument at Spiked Online in defence of the wide availability of firearms in the USA, attempting to argue from the statistics. I thought I would have a closer look at “Kevin Yuill on the Second Amendment“:

Each time the news of an American shooting, especially a school shooting, reaches across the Atlantic, the British media emit a collective high-pitched hysterical scream. The guilty parties always seem to be America’s gun culture and the Second Amendment, which allows Americans access to weapons, ‘the right to bear arms’. ‘It’s barmy’, the media sagely conclude.

Rationality is urgently needed to combat this clearly emotional outburst.

Yep. Let’s apply it to your argument.

First, cut out the fetishisation.

Say what? Aha - girls with guns. (Anyone who clicks through and then complains will not get any sympathy). Via Samizdata.

Firearms, like any other tool, are not in and of themselves dangerous. Handled responsibly,

There’s the rub. If they were not to hand, they could not be handled irresponsibily.

they are no more dangerous than many other household items, and are far less dangerous than cars.

I’ll think about that next time I kill someone with a Liquorice Allsort or assault them with a Hamster.

Let’s get guns in perspective.

Good. Let’s look at some numbers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control in the US, 11,624 homicides were committed using firearms in 2004.

Got it. 11,624 seems to be a hell of a lot.

The figure for the UK in 2004/5 (with about one fifth of the population) was .. er .. 73. The following years were 49 and 58. Small samples, so take the average and multiply it by five. if we multiply that by five, we get a comparative figure of 300.

Or to put it another way:

UK firearm homicides per person were 40 times lower than in the USA.

Compare this to deaths by unintentional poisoning (20,590), unintentional falls (18,807), or death by unintentional suffocation, drowning and fire (12,531). A Million Mom March against oysters or ladders? Not likely.

Red herring alert. We’re talking about gun murders.

If you have 20,000 people killed by poisoning and 20,000 by “unintentional falls” then you need a decent Health and Safety Executive and some people with common sense. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with gun-control or otherwise.

Are the high obesity figures in the USA a reason for keeping 200 million guns (estd) as well? What about the size of the average pizza - is that relevant as well?

Beam Me Up, Scotty

At this point we have a “beam me up Scotty” sideways teleport in the argument as the statistics switch from “firearm homicides” to “overall homicide rate“. This is significant because less than 10% of UK murders involve firearms (60 from roughly 800), while in the USA the figure is around 65-70% (2004: 11,624 from 16,137).

The switch may be because the USA has 40 times as many “firearm homicides” per person as the UK, so assuming that overall murder rate can be taken as a proxy for firearms murders makes the case for high availability of guns sound slightly more credible.

It is also a standard invalid comparison made when arguing this case.

Back to the argument.

Second, let us put to bed the myth that the number of available guns bears a direct relationship with homicide rates.

Er … yes it does:

Rates of Household Firearm Ownership and Homicide Across US Regions and States, 1988–1997
Matthew Miller, MD, MPH, ScD, Deborah Azrael, MS, PhD, and David Hemenway, PhD

Objectives. In this study we explored the association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide across the United States, by age groups.

Methods. We used cross-sectional time-series data (1988–1997) to estimate the association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide.

Results. In region- and state-level analyses, a robust association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide was found. Regionally, the association exists for victims aged 5 to 14 years and those 35 years and older. At the state level, the association exists for every age group over age 5, even after controlling for poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, and nonlethal violent crime.

Conclusions. Although our study cannot determine causation, we found that in areas where household firearm ownership rates were higher, a disproportionately large number of people died from homicide.

Yes, the United States does have higher gun ownership and a higher homicide rate than the UK, but strict gun controls operate in the Philippines and Mexico and both of those countries have higher homicide rates than America.

Are you really arguing that the Philippines (which has an insurgency) and Mexico (which has a huge transit drugs trade) are comparable with the UK in Gun Law Enforcement? I see that you switch from “gun ownership” to “gun controls” in one sentence. That begs the question of better law enforcement of gun controls in the UK over the other two countries. The comparison only has validity if you can show that all three countries have comparably effective law enforcement.

Meanwhile, Israel and Switzerland have higher adult gun ownership rates than America, and far lower homicide rates.

There you go again with “homicide rates” not “firearms homicide rates”. Not having seen the detailed stats I can’t comment on the figures for these countries, but it sounds to me that it’s not Switzerland and Israel that have the problem. Perhaps if the USA somehow changed its culture the murder figures may come down to European levels - 5,000-10,000 people a year would welcome that, as they’d still be alive.

Cherry-Ripe, Cherry-Ripe

Nationally, Washington DC, which banned handguns, has a murder rate of 80 per 100,000. In Arlington, Virginia - just across the Potomac and with almost no controls on guns - the rate is 1.6 per 100,000. In Glasgow, the rate is 5.6 per 100,000.

Leaving aside that you are cherry-picking stats (which is not valid), you’re comparing overall murder rates again, as if they have the same relation to firearms both sides of the Atlantic. They DON’T. If we apply the percentages for murders done with firearms in the UK (10%) and USA (70%) - admittedly an approximation - we get:

The argument just evaporated, even ignoring the cherry-picking.

And Arlington is the most educated County in the USA, so you should probably be comparing it to Oxford not Glasgow. It’s saying something that the most educated County in the States has more gun murders than one of our crime hotspots (with apologies to Glaswegians).

Wrapping-Up

As a kicker, the suicide and accidental deaths in the USA account for another 16,000+ lives ended:

There are 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents in an average year.

To wrap up - if the gun is not there, it really is very difficult to shoot someone (or yourself) with it.

[tags]gun control, gun statistics, spiked online, uk, usa, gun law, national rifle association[/tags]