What conclusion do you draw from the chart posted in the details?

I would get from that that they are trying to imply we need more gun control because the states with lax laws have more gun-related deaths

Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it.

@SergeantQueen are you going to be the modern day hippy that marches and protests until they get the job done? There is a new hippy movement brewing, by today’s teenagers and 20-somethings, to stop school shootings. The 60’s hippies were pretty instrumental in ending the Vietnam war.

I saw on some twitter account that they are orchestrating a protest where kids are going to leave class at 10AM on April 20th and sit outside to protest school shootings/gun control.

I’m staying in class.

I want a good education, job, family, all that. Maybe in the 60s people could do that because college wasn’t so damn expensive and you didn’t need much for a job, but I can’t see what I want to do in life being accomplished by flunking out or spending time protesting. If I was able to, I would. I don’t like being a bystander, but I also don’t like falling behind and not accomplishing what I want personally. Which may be considered selfish I guess. I think it’s realistic.

Glad you’re so focused on your goals @SergeantQueen . I would have thought you’d have lots of time for meaningful protest since you are on Fluther so much.

Haha, yeah well I’m on it usually when I’m at school and doing other school work. Usually not on as much at night or on weekends. I was inactive practically the whole summer!

Working link to chart

Conclusion: I wish I had taken statistics courses in school.

The chart only talks about gun-related deaths, not overall homicide rates, which some articles I found online pointed out, and those articles said it meant the information doesn’t tell us much one way or another. I ran into another article that said those articles were still doing the wrong kind of statistical analysis, which meant that their information doesn’t tell us much one way or another… But it didn’t seem to address the direct question about looking at overall homicide rates versus gun-related deaths alone.

I’m also now confused about how to go about making these sorts of comparisons (gun-related deaths vs. all homicide) when the different states have different homicide rates from one another, for potentially all sorts of reasons, so how do we compare what might or might not have happened in a given state with differing laws?.... Or does that all wind up cancelling out and not mattering somehow in the math?

Or would it be better to look at the homicide rates over time in a single state from a period when they had laxer gun laws to stricter gun laws, and see how different laws affect the same region at different times?

None of it seems simple. If someone wants to help explain to me generally what kinds of data are relevant for these kinds of comparisons, that would be much appreciated… I’d at least know which people are using the right kind of data to draw a meaningful conclusion.

It also doesn’t seem to address the main issue at the center of mass shootings—namely, the efficiency of certain devices for killing many people very quickly.

Looks like there are correlations between gun laws and gun-related deaths, and also correlations between both of those and region and education and culture and poverty and probably some other things. The states at the bottom are largely in the southeast and from what I gather, tend to be comparatively more backwards, racist, “right-wing”, crazy-Christian, etc.

From the bottom up, we’ve got Alaska (which doesn’t fit exactly), Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina, New Mexico…

From the top down, we’ve got Hawaii, New England, California, Washington… and (surprising to me, because of Chicago) Illinois.

Edit: I think there’s also a correlation to numbers of guns owned, or number of people with guns in their homes. See for example the answer to this question about guns versus video games as a correlate to gun violence . On the last chart, you can see that the same states are in the lower-left and upper-right sections of the graph, so guns in circulation is another correlate. My guess is all those things are related (but not video games – see the top graph on my link).

I haven’t sat down to really grind on it, but at first glance the order looks like it roughly follows states ordered by income. High income states appear to have stricter gun laws and less gun related deaths.

Obviously money doesn’t stop gun deaths directly, so I’d just be guessing on any links.

Interesting correlation @funkdaddy. Good catch. I’ll be it correlates to education levels, too.

I came across an article that spends time comparing the US to nations with stronger gun laws. Thought it might be relevant here. Among the information presented:

- ”‘Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,’ [wrote] David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center’s director.” (Note that he says homicide, and not “homicides involving guns.”)

- “it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. . . . Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.”

- ”‘A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.’”

- Graphic showing homicide rates. USA has the highest homicide rate among 15 listed industrialized nations. (USA, 5.1 people per 100,000 killed in 2012; the others, ~.5–1.5.)

- Caption on graphic: “On average, assaults in the US are 3x more likely to involved guns than these other countries.”

- “One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: ‘While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.’”

- “If a city or state passes strict gun control measures, people can simply cross a border to buy guns in a jurisdiction with laxer laws. . . . According to a 2014 report from the Chicago Police Department, nearly 60 percent of the guns in crime scenes that were recovered and traced between 2009 and 2013 came from outside the state. About 19 percent came from Indiana. . . . A 2016 report from the New York State Office of the Attorney General found that 74 percent of guns used in crimes in New York between 2010 and 2015 came from states with lax gun laws. (The gun trafficking chain from Southern states with weak gun laws to New York is so well-known it even has a name: ‘the Iron Pipeline.’)”

- “And another 2016 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that most of the guns — as much as 70 percent — used in crimes in Mexico, which has strict gun laws, can be traced back to the US, which has generally weaker gun laws.”

- “Connecticut’s law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, for example, was followed by a 40 percent drop in gun homicides and a 15 percent reduction in suicides [note: that says suicides, not suicides involving guns]. Similar gains were seen in Missouri.”

Full article.

And another article (sorry it’s from same source. Came across it when I was trying to re-find the first one.)