1993 to 2013: More Guns, Less Gun Crime

Source (permission to re-post given in the article): http://www.alloutdoor.com/2015/12/11/1993-to-2013-more-guns-less-gun-crime/




This falls in the category of things we already knew–most of us, anyhow–but which really need to be presented and explained to all those who shout for even more restrictive gun laws than the already-failed ones we have.

American Enterprise Institute created this image to illustrate that, while the number of guns in the USA increased radically over a twenty-year period, the number of gun homicides fell dramatically, as explained in a post on their site.

The chart above was created after the one below; as explained in the post, a reader found the earlier one misleading due to the intersection of the lines, which appears to indicate degradation before improvement.



From the article:

According to data retrieved from the Centers for Disease Control, there were 7 firearm-related homicides for every 100,000 Americans in 1993 (see light blue line in chart). By 2013 (most-recent year available), the gun homicide rate had fallen by nearly 50% to only 3.6 homicides per 100,000 population.

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Based on data from a 2012 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report (and additional data from another Wonkblog article “There are now more guns than people in the United States“), the number of privately owned firearms in US increased from about 185 million in 1993 to 357 million in 2013. Adjusted for the US population, the number of guns per American increased from 0.93 per person in 1993 to 1.45 in 2013, which is a 56% increase in the number of guns per person that occurred during the same period when gun violence decreased by 49%…

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Bottom Line: Even if you’re not convinced that increased gun ownership reduces violent crime and gun homicides, you should be totally convinced of this indisputable fact: Gun violence has been decreasing significantly over time, not increasing as you’ll frequently hear from anti-gun politicians and progressives. The gun-related homicide rate of 3.6 deaths per 100,000 population in each of the years 2010, 2011 and 2013 makes those recent years the safest in at last 20 years, and possibly the safest in modern US history…

Feel free to share this with your friends, especially those who keep calling for government bans on our only effective means of self-defense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States

Comments from that article:

JeremiahnkemHuffer • a year ago
I hear liberals always throwing this one out there: "white men wish it was still like the wild west!" Yea, we all should. If you took a history class concerning the west, not just watch Tombstone, you'd find that there actually was very little crime because if you came into town making trouble, causing shenanigans, you probably wouldn't be around long enough to shenan again.
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robocop33 • a year ago
Is this not proof enough that bad-guys worry about armed victims?
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Bill robocop33 • a year ago
No, it's not. The first rule of research is that correlation does not equal causation.
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Bob Wynne Bill • a year ago
Is this proof that increased gun ownership does NOT cause higher gun mortality rates?
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Bill Bob Wynne • a year ago
Huh? Is that a hypothesis, or some form of null hypothesis? It isn't "proof" of anything. There's no causal link identified. I'd bet that you could replace "guns per person" with "cell phones per 1,000 persons," adjust the scale, and seem a similar curve, but an increased number of cell phones in society is unlikely to have impacted deaths by gunfire.

Graphs with multiple scales are pretty much by design misleading anyway, intentionally or not.
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Bob Wynne Bill • a year ago
No, it is called a question. It is denoted by the little hook thingy with a dot under it at the end. I am guessing form your reply that your answer would have been "No".
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Bill Bob Wynne • a year ago
You are correct. It is not a statistically valid proof of anything. You could infer that increased gun ownership doesn't cause increased gun mortality rates, but it's not proof. "Gun mortality rate" isn't defined either, and is an unnecessarily and dangerously vague label. It's the same error that antis make: lumping all deaths or injuries resulting from the discharge of a firearm together and trying to link that to quantity of firearms. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds of variables within those two broad categories that need to be identified and controlled for.
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DaveGinOly Bill • a year ago
It certainly is proof. Bob has asked if the statistics falsify the statement "More guns equals more crime." Although the statistics do not prove "more guns equals less crime," they do falsify the statement "more guns equals more crime." A causal link is not necessary. (While, statistically, it's undeniable that firearms homicide rates and raw numbers have fallen during the same period of time that the number of firearms in private hands and the number of firearms owners have increased. A 50% decrease in firearms homicides over the last 34 years or so is certainly statistically significant, and so is the increase in the number of privately-owned firearms over the same period of time.) The statement "more guns equals more crime" is disproved whenever crime falls while gun ownership goes up. Whether there is a causal link or not is not relative because the hypothesis is disproved ipso facto. Bob's assertion (by way of a rhetorical question) that "increased gun ownership does not cause higher gun mortality rates" denies that there a causal link between increased firearms ownership and increased crime, but it admits the possibility that the inverse (more guns equals less crime) could be true without actually asserting it or attempting to prove it.
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Bill DaveGinOly • a year ago
I disagree; the null hypothesis in this instance would be along the lines of "the number of guns in circulation does not effect the number of firearms related injuries or crime rate either positively or negatively." Actually, those both should be split out as variables.

"They do falsify the statement 'more guns equals more crime.'" Only if you limit the argument to two variables, guns and crime, and accept that correlation equals causation, which is hardly good science, given the multivariate nature of "crime."
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Doctor Jelly robocop33 • a year ago
Statistically speaking, the rate of decrease in gun homicides from '99 to '13 has an insignificant change while gun ownership continues an unwaivering increase. Makes it seem like something else happened between '93 and '99 to decrease gun homicides... Kind've like the Australian crackdown in that gun crime was steadily decreasing before the law went into effect, and continued to decrease at, give or take, the same rate after the buyback. Neither these graphs, nor Australia's prove gun control does or does not work...
Also, how is the original graph with intersecting lines confusing to anyone? It's pretty darn clear...
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JeremiahJenkemHuffer Doctor Jelly • a year ago
Millennials haven't learned graph reading on microagressions yet...
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BeGe1 JeremiahJenkemHuffer • a year ago
This is not a generation battle. Don't try to turn it into one, as all you'll do is alienate the future of your own side of the argument. There's a very large percentage of millennials that fall on the constitutional side of thinking and political beliefs, they just don't get CNN airtime for doing it.
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Bob Wynne Doctor Jelly • a year ago
The original graph has two different, unrelated scales on the vertical axis. You could move either up or down and the data line that correlates to it and still be accurate about the data. But that would move the intersection point right or left. Most would not recognize that the intersection point is arbitrary, based on how the data is graphically represented.
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Doctor Jelly Bob Wynne • a year ago
Unfortunately that does appear to be the case. It just irks me that a (possibly) large portion of people can't understand that there are 2 different Y axes (I had to look up that one to make sure it was the correct plural spelling of axis!) sharing a singular X axis... The waning competence/retention of education in this country bothers me far and wide more than any gun law in the world. Sadly, I find myself encroaching on such lack of intelligence more and more every year. Use it or lose it is apparently holding true with my brain...
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BeGe1 Doctor Jelly • a year ago
I would take issue with the statement that all these things together don't prove "gun control does or does not work".

The basic principle behind gun control "working" is implementing higher gun control and getting lower violence, quite literally saying that it will be a causation and create a correlation. The fact that there is not a visible correlation showing higher gun control and lower violence is quite literally the definition of gun control not working.

It does not have to show an opposite effect to be proven to have not had it's intended effect.
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Doctor Jelly BeGe1 • a year ago
I would argue from a strict standpoint of 'working' being defined as lower crime for more restrictive gun laws, that in Australia the laws are working. Crime rate has decreased since the enactment of the buyback, thus restrictive gun laws 'work'. I don't believe that's the case though because the crime rate was dropping before the laws, and at approximately the same rate too. Thus restrictive gun laws are not likely having a significant impact.
On the American side of things, I think the above graphs support the idea that gun laws decrease deaths too since the only significant drop in gun deaths was around the time Clinton was enacting more restrictive laws. Since then the rate has pretty well stayed the same, not showing any progress in lessening deaths for significantly more guns in citizen's hands.
The data doesn't have to show an inverse to prove intended effect, yes, but it's suspicious and requires a more in depth study to prove whether their claims are or are not correct. At best, these graphs prove nothing, at worst they are intentionally misleading. Either way, there is a significant amount of other data that needs to be taken into account regarding the idea of more or less guns and the consequences of such.
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GRComments • a year ago
I'd also like to see this with the places that discourage legal ownership of guns taken out. I'd be curious to see what it's like when you take out Chicago with its low legal ownership of guns and high crime rate--even if that rate is falling. I expect it's not falling as fast as areas without gun control. Then Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and a few other cities. I wonder if the chart would be more or less impressive. Don't know, just wondering.
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mingpooh • a year ago
I think the proper metric here would be gun homicide to gun ownership numbers. The favorite phrase of the gun control folks lately seems to be something along the lines of "more guns means more deaths by guns." Even though the rate of gun homicides, per capita, has been fairly constant since the early 2000's, the number of guns owned has continued to rise, so the ratio of guns to gun deaths has continued to fall. That shows the invalidity of the above claim, regardless of whether there is a causal component to the correlation or not.
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Guest • a year ago
An armed society is a polite society. If the scum coward bad guys know you are not defenseless, they will think twice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime

"Lott examines the effects of shall issue laws on violent crime across the United States.
His conclusion is that shall issue laws, which allow citizens to carry concealed weapons, steadily decrease violent crime. He explains that this result makes sense because criminals are deterred by the risk of attacking an armed victim. As more citizens arm themselves, the danger to criminals increases."

From the first article 2nd graph. I think I've got more than the 1.45 guns per person

hitwtom said:

From the first article 2nd graph. I think I've got more than the 1.45 guns per person

Click to expand...

Yep, LOL. More than a few of us are probably throwing off some of the statistics.

Officially, or so told, I think I only own 1.45 guns, not going to go count it/them/whatever.

Crime rates fall when the median age of a country goes higher. Roe v Wade was another huge impact on reducing crime in USA. Guns per capita in USA is so skewed to the rest of the world due to our wealth.
Very few countries do people own more than one or two guns. My community is 159 homes. I know two friends that could arm every home with their arsenals and still have some left over.

Sort the list by age, and you'll note the correlation to crime. The median age of USA is lower than Europe thanks to immigrants.
Look at Mexico, 28 and India is 27.

Excellent.......has sticky potential.

Schipperke said:

Crime rates fall when the median age of a country goes higher. Roe v Wade was another huge impact on reducing crime in USA. Guns per capita in USA is so skewed to the rest of the world due to our wealth.
Very few countries do people own more than one or two guns. My community is 159 homes. I know two friends that could arm every home with their arsenals and still have some left over.

Sort the list by age, and you'll note the correlation to crime. The median age of USA is lower than Europe thanks to immigrants.
Look at Mexico, 28 and India is 27.

Click to expand...

These other factors are relevant and discussed in the research, and conclusion still stands. I would venture to guess you have not read John Lott's book.

DanGuy48 said:

Excellent.......has sticky potential.

Click to expand...

Thanks, and I would agree.

Please anyone, feel free to help make or at least illustrate the case. There are numerous towns in the US where many citizens own/carry guns and crime is extremely low.