Teresa Tritch recently opined in the New York Times that “…available data shows a clear link between strong gun laws and less gun carnage, and that’s good enough for me” (Do California’s Gun Laws Prevent Gun Deaths?, July 30). The “available data” may be good enough for Ms. Tritch, but it isn’t good enough for working criminologists and statisticians, and it shouldn’t be good enough to create an informed public opinion about appropriate policy.
Tritch reviewed the latest Brady Campaign report card on state-level gun control laws. Not surprisingly – considering the Brady Center’s gun banning mission – states with the most gun control laws got the best grades.
The Brady Campaign sets arbitrary points for statutes conforming to their gun control wish list, then fails to associate their point system with any established statistical relevancy or correlation to violence reduction. Every year when Brady’s scorecard appears, critical-thinking researchers dump the data into their statistical analysis software to produce scatter diagrams of the Brady scores and categories of violence. Every year the scatter diagrams show no correlation between more gun laws and less violence.
The validity of Brady’s grades has been the subject of endless critique and well-deserved derision, including by me. This year, the researchers at the Gun Facts project noted that California and Arizona – first and last on the Brady gun control point system – had identical violent crime rates. The result of Brady’s artificial analysis: no meaningful analysis. In other words, Brady scores grade nothing.
But the catchy “report card” angle makes a great press release.
Unfortunately, Tritch builds on Brady’s unsound foundation and irrational scoring system by adding a review of the top- and bottom ten states on the Brady gun control list, as was done by another gun control activist group – the Violence Policy Center (VPC). The VPC did a similarly biased review, using only the top- and bottom five states to draw its conclusions. Tritch’s inaccurate conclusion is that the gun control laws Brady pushes work because “seven of the 10 states with the strongest gun laws in 2013 also had the lowest rate of gun deaths.”
Well, no.
There are numerous problems with using this selective top and bottom sample approach. Five states with high gun death rates were either in the Deep South or in the rugged northern territories (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana). The five states with the lowest gun death rates were all autocratic North Eastern asylums plus a tropical island (Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Hawaii and the Times’ own New York). Culturally, economically, politically and recreationally, these states have only one commonality, namely being in America.
Anyone not in the gun control advocacy business can see the inappropriate apples-to-kumquats comparison.
Tritch also apparently included suicides to the “gun death” total, despite endless analysis showing that guns are not a determinant suicide variable, and that gun control laws don’t stop suicides. That is, gun availability does not change the likelihood of a successful suicide (if it did, Lithuania would have a suicide rate 1/100th of the United States because they have fewer than 1/100th the number of guns per capita, yet their suicide rate is three times ours). This is important because three of the top five “gun death” states have high suicide rates (Montana, Wyoming and Alaska top the suicide charts in America). Conversely, all of the five states with low gun death rates are in the bottom six states for suicides (Connecticut beat out Hawaii by a nose).
Savvy people also notice that Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana are heavily rural and have strong hunting cultures. Bullets that drop deer can easily kill a human. Since the occasional fatal hunting or shooting range accidents count as “gun deaths”, the top-and-bottom analysis is skewed again. Louisiana and Mississippi have the highest accidental gun death rates in the country. All the other studied states – with either strong or weak gun control laws – have so few accidental gun deaths that the Center for Disease Control doesn’t even calculate their rates … they are statistically insignificant.
“Gun deaths” alone – however polluted the numbers may be – also fail to consider the social utility of guns for violence prevention and crime deterrence. These are the primary uses American’s have for owning firearms. After compensating for some lingering racist activities in Louisiana and Mississippi (Ku Klux Klan and Skin Head violence still occurs there), homicide rates in the remaining eight states – with and without “strict” gun control laws – are well below national homicide averages. Montana, Wyoming (“weak” gun control law states), Hawaii and Massachusetts (“strong” gun control states) are all clustered in the bottom quartile for homicides.
Robbery is a different matter. New York and New Jersey are both in the top ten states for robberies, a crime which criminologists claim is deterred by private gun ownership. Louisiana is slightly above national robbery norms, and the other seven states are all below the medium (Montana and Wyoming, two “weak” gun control law states, are in the bottom five for robbery rates). Gun ownership scares robbers away?
The Brady Center report card has proven – year after year – to be a self-serving public relations puff peace, as useless as the gun control laws the Brady Center promotes. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Tritch, who is obviously philosophically aligned with the Brady Center’s civilian disarmament mission, failed to follow-up on the pesky scientific details of which criminologists are so fond, and on which sound cause-and-effect correlational conclusions are dependent.
Not surprising, but certainly disappointing to those seeking an honest debate.
