Who's there??
Why ... the person who said:
"easy access to guns in VA and MD cause DC's high crime rate of 26.62".
Somebody *must* have said that. I mean, otherwise, why would you be asking (emphasis added):
"Why don't other states contiguous with VA and MD
have homicide rates as high as DC if easy access to
guns in VA and MD cause DC's high crime rate of 26.62?The source you quoted DID say:
Almost half the guns used in the District's crimes have been tracked
to the neighboring states of Virginia and Maryland, where the laws
are far easier for buyers to circumvent.
I seem to be missing a connection here. But damn, I just don't think it's my fault.
I think SOMEONE IS MISREPRESENTING SOMETHING by asking a question loaded with a false premise: the allegation that "easy access to guns in VA and MD cause DC's high crime rate of 26.62", which no one appears to have made and so no one need respond to a question based on. Just as I would not respond to the question "why doesn't your dog run away if you haven't stopped beating it?"
I note the suggestion by someone else that your comparables seem to be just a trifle disingenuously chosen. (Okay, make that
my characterization of someone else's suggestion that you might want to try different comparables.)
Reminds me of the equally disingenuous study that compared homicide rates in Canadian provinces with the homicide rates in the adjoining US states. Which amounted to comparing a province like Quebec, with a population of over 7 million people, including Montreal, with a very heterogenous population approaching 3.5 million, and other large cities, to ... Vermont ... with an essentially homogeneous population of just over 600,000.
Oddly enough, the crime rates in adjoining provinces and states were very similar ... for comparisons like Quebec to Vermont. Quebec to New York State, or Ontario to Michigan, didn't work quite so well.
Amazing what you can do with numbers. When you really try.
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For those interested:
The Impact of the Availability of Firearms on Violent Crime(and pleeeease note that the title does NOT SAY "firearms cause violent crime)
The author of the working paper is Thomas Gabor, the criminology professor quoted in the Globe and Mail article about armed robbery discussed in another thread. Have at it if you like; I'm just referring to this bit:
Centerwall (1991) examined the conclusions drawn by Sloan and his colleagues by comparing Canadian provinces with bordering American states. He purported to show that, despite the large disparity in the availability of firearms--American states bordering on Canada had between four and ten times as many handguns--the homicide rates of the American states were not substantially higher than provinces bordering on them.
This writer disagrees with Centerwall's conclusion, as an averaging out of the homicide rates in the states and bordering provinces (with the large cities included) reveals a larger overall homicide rate in the American states (5.4 to 4.9 per 100,000). Such an averaging understates the differences as the least populated states and provinces (e.g.,, North Dakota and New Brunswick or the Yukon) are given the same weight as more heavily populated provinces like Ontario and states like New York.
If Centerwall would have compared Quebec and Ontario (accounting jointly for at least one-half of Canada's population) with New York state and Michigan (accounting for well over one-half the population of bordering states), he would have found that these two American states collectively had four times the homicide rate of their Canadian counterparts. Centerwall's United States/Canada comparison includes many of America's lowest crime states (Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire), while at the same time excluding two of Canada's least violent provinces (Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island).
As I say, that's the bit I'm referring to, in relation to the topic of this thread. The study that was referred to at the beginning of that passage was discussed just before the bit I have quoted, and is also of interest; efforts
are made to compare where "all other things are equal", and that was one of them:
A group of emergency room surgeons and epidemiologists conducted a study comparing Vancouver and Seattle, two west coast cities with much in common other than their rates of firearm ownership (Sloan et al., 1988). The cities seemed ideal for a cross-border comparison because they were geographically close, approximately of equal size, similar in standard of living and their residents shared similar cultural tastes (e.g.,, preferred similar television programmes). Offences with firearms carry mandatory sentences in both places. Furthermore, the cities had similar rates of robbery and burglary during the seven-year study period, and the rates of assault were similar during most of this period. The authors found, however, that Seattle had a far higher rate of firearm ownership than did its Canadian counterpart.
Being similar in so many respects, with an exception being the rate of firearm availability, provided a natural laboratory to determine the effects of that availability on homicide with many sociocultural factors held constant. Over the study period, Seattle had a homicide rate more than 50 percent higher than that of Vancouver. The homicide rates with knives and weapons other than firearms were almost identical in the two cities. Seattle, however, had nearly five times the rate of homicide by firearms than Vancouver. It was these firearms homicides that accounted for Seattle's overall higher rate of homicide.
One of the criticisms of this study is that Seattle has a larger black and Hispanic population than Vancouver and because these groups tend to have especially high homicide rates in the United States, this factor could account for the different overall rates in the two cities (Centerwall, 1991). This criticism, however, does not explain why the non-firearm homicide rates in the two cities was the same, unless one can show that blacks and Hispanics are far more likely to kill with a gun than the rest of the population. Unless there is a relationship between race/ethnicity and a greater inclination to use firearms, this study suggests that the increased availability of firearms is likely to lead to more fatal outcomes, given fairly similar rates of attacks/assaults.
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