Largest Gun Study Ever: More Guns, More Murder
BY ZACK BEAUCHAMP ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2013 AT 12:33 PM
The largest study of gun violence in the United States, released Thursday afternoon, confirms a point that should be obvious: widespread American gun ownership is fueling America’s gun violence epidemic.
The study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time.
Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called “fixed effect regression” to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: “age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate” were all accounted for.
No good data on national rates of gun ownership exist (partly because of the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress), so the authors used the percentage of suicides that involve a firearm (FS/S) as a proxy. The theory, backed up by a wealth of data, is that the more guns there are any in any one place, the higher the percentage of people who commit suicide with guns as opposed to other mechanisms will be.
more
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/09/13/2617131/largest-gun-study-guns-murder/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Having conducted actual research and been required to crunch the numbers myself, I feel pretty confident saying that if you don't have THAT fucking number, then you don't really have a valid basis for drawing conclusions.
I'm going to find my eyeglasses and go over this study and then get back to you, but I'm pretty confident that this group started with a conclusion and worked backwards.
Aloha.
A hui hou kakou
by the most outspoken members of both sides of the issue.
The results should be revealing!
The results are predictable too.
This OP is actually more well suited for the Gungeon but unless someone alerts or a GD host sees it and wants to alert, it will stay here.
I'm a GD host, don't care either way.
I "full trashed" the Gungeon long ago, but now and then it's fun when a few wander over to GD to sell their wares.
Oh and some anecdotal "stories" to refute this! So there!
They're brilliant. 
eta - to the mirt-mobile 
Instead of dicking around with trying to ostracize anyone who supports the RKBA.
The solutions lie in addressing poverty and inequity and hopelessness.
By "we" I mean both we as Americans, including our legislators (both parties) who are doing a damn shitty job of taking care of the middle and lower class AND elected Democrats, many of whom support outsourcing and defunding public programs and education, AND we progressives, which happens to include a small but noisy contingent who spend more time trying insulting people than anything useful.
I hate that they do, I don't really think they are progressive, but they sure send a lot of energy in a divisive direction.
I haven't missed a thing, I know what we do toward social and economic justice, but this ridiculous focus on the gun and not the root causes of the violence has got to stop.
Yellow ribbons and candlelight vigils and laws that reclassify simple rifles as Assault Weapons which must be registered is just too much bullshit and police state nonsense for me.
Proposed California Law:
I'm very disappointed in these Democrats, savvy progressives would never let the state have that much power.
Thanks for your reply.
If you know of anything recent, please give me a link, it would be great news.
But what I hear instead are complaints that ideas like safety education are NRA talking points, or that it's a way to brainwash kids into thinking guns are OK.
You know what that sounds like? It sounds like the Freepers who fight sex awareness and tolerance education.
No CTYankee, there is an ever louder drumbeat that aims to remove firearms altogether and some who want to abolish the Second Amendment.
I'm pushing 60, I've been around, and this hysteria wasn't happening during the last century the way it is happening now.
And I thank you for that.
Nonetheless, we each of us are our own political animal and everyone is the singular expert in their own experience.
I dare say no one of us can say that they better represent "progressives" than another; there are too many varieties and stances on different issues.
Perhaps progressives in America, and particularly those in larger cities and on the coasts, have a solid history of favoring very strict gun control, and I think you would have to agree that some would like them banned altogether.
I'm no fan of handguns, but I do feel quite strongly that we are becoming a police state and that's not a good time to surrender any of our constitutional rights.
Instead, I support more uniform gun laws, closing of loop holes, background checks for every gun purchase, basically what California has had for years but not what they are trying to pass now, which goes too far, IMO.
So I'm not really sure where our opinions differ, CTyankee. We both support restoring the safety nets, single payer, education, reversing the shift of wealth from all of us to the 1%.
The difference is that I don't see enough happening while I see so much activity trying to legislate guns out of existence. We are going to differ on that one, I guess.
Take care and thanks again for sharing some interesting professional history!
And I hate edits and the red text in a post.
SACRAMENTO -- A package of bills that would once again give California the nation's toughest gun-control laws passed a key legislative hurdle Tuesday, setting up a white-hot Capitol showdown.
By the hearing's end, the committee had voted along party lines to approve bills that would add all semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines to the state's list of banned assault weapons; ban owning any magazine that holds more than 10 rounds, including existing ones; ban "bullet buttons" that allow fast swapping of rifle magazines; require long-gun buyers to pass a written safety test; and add more crimes to the list of those that would bar someone from carrying a firearm. The bills, already passed by the state Senate, are moving inexorably closer to floor votes and the governor's desk.
snip
California's gun laws -- including strict background checks and waiting periods for all gun purchases -- for decades made the state the most restrictive in the nation. But since December's massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., New York has leapfrogged ahead of the Golden State by toughening its assault weapons ban, expanding registration requirements and limiting magazines to seven rounds. Colorado's new gun laws, though not as tight as California's or New York's, have inspired a recall effort against two lawmakers.
snip
Sitting next to Steinberg was Adrienne Egeland, who was teaching kindergarten at Stockton's Cleveland Elementary School in January 1989 when a gunman killed five children and wounded 29 more -- a shooting that inspired California's assault weapons ban. Egeland, her voice shaking, testified that the children's wounds looked like those she saw simulated during her Army basic training, "and all I had was Band-Aids."
snip
But Worley contended that Steinberg's bill balloons the assault weapons law to include firearms that aren't even remotely of military style. Aaron Maguire, lobbyist for the California State Sheriffs' Association, called it "vastly over-inclusive of firearms that are legitimate sporting and hunting weapons." Gerald Upholt, lobbyist for the California Association of Firearms Retailers said, "You're looking at literally millions of guns" that would be affected.
the rest of the story:
http://www.mercurynews.com/politics-government/ci_23856108/gun-control-bills-advance-sacramento
Which seems to be "I don't need to actually understand the science, I just know it's BS". The problem is, as I'll explain, the very arguments you are using to dismiss research on gun violence are almost precisely the same ones that climate deniers use to dismiss climate research. I presume you are not a climate change denier, but your acceptance or rejection of certain scientific results appears to depend only on politics, rather than substance. Maybe asking you to take an open mind toward science in an area where you hold strong political views is too much to ask.
I'll start with the closest you come to a substantive criticism.
This study uses what is known as a proxy variable. Surely you are not aware of this, but by curtly dismissing proxy variables, a technique that is widely used both in social and physical sciences, you have actually dismissed a large part of climate science as well. You see, there aren't direct temperature measurements going back more than 100 or so years. In order to reconstruct climate patterns before that, scientists need to use proxies -- things like tree rings, ice cores, etc. Presumably, in your mind, this makes climate science "tripe" as well.
Of course, in both cases, the scientists don't just "guess" about what would be a good proxy. Proxies need to be validated statistically. For example, they compare the tree rings to the measured temperatures during the last century, and only after showing that there is a strong correlation do they use the tree rings to extrapolate backwards.
The proxy for gun ownership used in this paper, FS/S, has been validated similarly, by comparing it against survey data where survey data is available. The advantage of FS/S is that, like tree rings, more data is available and it allows more detailed studies to be performed. FS/S has been used and accepted as a proxy for gun ownership in the literature for a decade or so, in various studies, including one of those which I linked to in that last post, and you decided to ignore. I don't know of any serious scholar who would describe a study as "tripe" for using this proxy variable.
You may have a point if there were a corresponding decline in non-gun homicides, because of some substitution effect. Of course, if you were familiar with the literature, you would know that this is not the case. In fact, two of those studies that you declined to read because you were just so certain that they were garbage contain this very finding.
Now I'm not saying there's anything WRONG with that, but when you require people to pay to even read the study, I tell smell a rat.
The fact that the study is behind a paywall has nothing to do with the author. It has to do with the publisher and the journal. If you dismiss every study that is behind a paywall, you will be dismissing a very large fraction of the scientific research that comes out (a few examples: http://prl.aps.org/, http://jama.jamanetwork.com/issue.aspx). The practice of journals requiring subscriptions is the subject of some debate in scientific communities. Some people believe that all science should be free for everyone. The publishers argue that performing editorial and peer review duties to maintain scientific standards costs money. The unfortunate result of this is that a large portion of scientific publications are only available to people who work at universities or research labs, which maintain subscriptions to the journals, although sometimes free versions of papers can be found elsewhere, such as on the author's home page.
Presumably you didn't know this, which is why you thought the paywall was some kind of scheme by the author to enrich himself and prevent people like you from reading the study. Now, the fact that you are unfamiliar with scientific practice is not in itself troubling -- not everyone can be expected to read scientific journals and keep up to date with the latest policies of scientific publications. The problem is, rather than ask, "why is this behind a paywall?" instead you go strait into denialism mode ("I smell a rat"
. This truly indicative of the same kind of reflexive anti-intellectualism that still has Texas trying to push creationism into their classrooms.
Let's say that there's no bias, no agenda, no inaccuracies.
What's your takeaway, aside from "more guns, higher incident of murders"?
What do you recommend be done about it, if anything.
I won't claim to be innocent of namecalling (but the other guy started it... ).
if you have reason to believe his numbers are inaccurate, you could point that out to him...at one time I corresponded via email to a few American history professors who had published books and asked them questions about their books, explaining that I was doing grad work in a course on the period following the ratification of the Constitution up to Andrew Jackson's election. I got some interesting responses! Pauline Maier was esp. nice (I think she just passed away, IIRC). If you want to pursue this further, you could give it a shot...I found email addresses on the website of the schools they were teaching in. I don't know if you can still do this now...my experience was in 1999...I called myself the "world's oldest grad student"...
...which I was...
You see, the parts of the article taken directly from the study are surrounded in quotes (you know, "like this" . The parts that are not from the study are not in quotes. The error you found was not in quotes.
But it's not quite up there with "I know all I need to know".
Nice fine, pinotbean.
Not surprised though, just disappointed at how many latch on to something like that and treat it as gospel.
One thing to consider as you go forward. While you are "under no obligation to follow up with hours and hours of reading" it helps if you have not gone around the thread asking folks on our side if we had read the study. Again and again. It makes people wonder that if you care about other people reading it, it kinda makes sense that you read it, too. If only for your own satisfaction, irrespective of starting any follow up debate.
Just a word to the wise
I don't think that was me.
Have a good Sunday!
Did I miss the last few Friday night challenges, or are you on hiatus?
And even among supporters of the Second Amendment, those slogans are only used by a fringe few.
Now if you want to talk about reducing violence, lets talk about reducing the reasons that kids get into gangs, lets talk about decriminalizing drugs and restoring jobs for regular people and fixing schools and neighborhoods.
Let's talk about that, billh58, because the strategy of broadbrushing and namecalling is getting us nowhere, not even to first base.
Don't you agree?
...regarding: "...the more guns there are any in any one place, the higher the percentage of people who commit suicide with guns...".
I can't believe anyone would need a study to come to such an obvious conclusion. What next, a study to see whether daytime or night time is better for tanning?
I suppose next they'll figure something like auto accidents are more prevalent where there are a lot of cars.
I know the NRA has a lot of lobbying influence but I don't know the AJPH, the NEJM... ever pays them any mind.
I'm not against some sensible laws but I am pro-RKBA and this conclusion seems to be a no-brainer.
It was just the conclusion mentioned in the OP. Access to the study requires authentication/signin/signup... I'm just not that interested.
I've worked with psychometricians in the past. They are one of the few groups that do things more boring than what I do.
