Gun Control’s Effect on Violence, Part I

Does gun control reduce violence? No. But if you ask the Hillary supporting Center for American Progress (CAP) they’ll roll out their special report saying that it does. The report, as an aside, has been referenced by The New York Times. That’s a bad start. Robert Verbruggen at The American Conservative, explains how the report references the “Gun Violence Index.” The index is basically a measure of gun deaths. But two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides, not violence. Stricter state guns laws do not correlate with less gun violence. Verbruggen explains:

We can see the importance of this second point in CAP’s own data. Most strikingly, the report’s central claim—that states with stricter gun laws have less gun violence—does not hold for homicide, which is what most people think of when they hear “gun violence.” Not that most readers could tell that from the report: the finding is relegated to a footnote, and even there the authors fail to note that the correlation is far too weak to be considered statistically significant.

(Technically speaking, it’s 0.13, with 50 observations, one for each state. That translates to a “p-value” of 0.37, far above the traditional 0.05 cutoff. If you generated the data at random, there would be more than a one-in-three chance of getting a correlation this strong.)

None of this is necessarily to deny that weak gun laws or high gun ownership—CAP’s report makes no attempt to distinguish between the two*—can have bad consequences. They do seem to correlate with suicide rates, as well as some specific types of homicide, including police and intimate-partner violence. Even when it comes to overall homicide rates, some more advanced studies (though far from all) argue there’s a correlation there once the data have been adjusted to account for differences in demographics and culture.

Of course, such adjustments are crucial if we are trying to discover causation, and not mere correlation. But CAP’s analysis makes no attempt to perform them. And even if we could definitively say that strict gun laws reduce violence, the analysis would say nothing about which gun laws in particular help, because they’re all compressed into a single scale.

UNH Law Federalist Society Presents John R. Lott Jr.

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E.J. Smith is the Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH, where he completed course-work in Practical and Defensive Handgun, Conceal Carry Pistol, Shotguns, Precision Scope Rifle and Kidnapping Prevention. E.J. plays a Yamaha Recording Custom drum set with Zilldjian cymbals. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com. Sign up here to receive all the best content from Richardcyoung.com each week.