[trasz]

Of course its not _simply_ guns, gun availability is just one of the factors.

>gun ownership rates across civilized countries negatively correlates with overall homicide rates

[citation needed]

>The same happens across US states, which have varying gun laws.

Well, no - they might have slightly different laws, but generally speaking firearms are wildly available everywhere.

>concluded that guns are used more often to deter crimes than are used for crimes

Can you show me where it says that?

[ChrisLomont]

>[citation needed]

Easy to check yourself - find list of gun ownership by country, or by OECD, or by state. Find homicide rates for each, also easy. Put in excel or Google sheets, run a correlation.

>Well, no - they might have slightly different laws, but generally speaking firearms are wildly available everywhere.

Such a simplistic argument would then imply crimes, homicides with guns, etc., should be the same rate across states, and they are not. By your argument, no per state laws would have any effect, in which case they're useless. But this seems far from true.

So, if laws do have any effect, it should be detectable. Since the correlation for gun owner vs overall homicide rates point to the opposite direction, and it seems like that there are far more defensive gun uses, perhaps people are deterring some crime.

>Can you show me where it says that?

Page 15: "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010)."

Also, somewhat related, p16, "Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies".

[trasz]

>Easy to check yourself - find list of gun ownership by country

Yeah, what it shows is the exact opposite to your claim.

>Such a simplistic argument would then imply crimes, homicides with guns, etc., should be the same rate across states

No, it would only work like that if it was the only variable.

>Page 15: "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses

Please read the methodology. In that very same paper you’ve quoted.

[ChrisLomont]

>Yeah, what it shows is the exact opposite to your claim.

Not according to my calcs - are you using gun homicides or total homicides? Most people mistake the former and ignore the latter. Across all countries, [1] and [2] result in a correlation between avg guns per 100 people and total homicides of -0.13. This means across all countries increased guns correlates with less homicides, which is what I stated. It also gives negative for OECD countries.

What data sets did you compare and what correlation did you get? I get similar answers to the above on many different places to find data.

>No, it would only work like that if it was the only variable.

Ah, but it works like that from your claims above. That seems a bit dishonest.

> Please read the methodology.

I did. I've also read most of the 19 surveys I could find. The sentence I quoted is exactly the conclusion on the matter from the report authors.

Of the 19, there is a range from 108k (with the problem listed - the report didn't even ask about the issue) to several with tens of millions. The majority landed around a few million.

Now, if there's a topic that you're not already decided on, and 19 different reports from over a dozen research groups report on some social topic, with a few extreme outliers and a significant number clustered around the same result, using multiple methodologies for the 19 reports, what would a be a reasonable conclusion?

The one the study reaches in this report: the middle of the road is the main claim directly stated, which I quoted above.

Or do you want to tell me that there is a different conclusion to the opposite effect in the report?

Also no comment on their finding that using a gun defensively results in less injury to the defender? Does that not seem a useful thing to know?

I get the feeling you picked a side and read evidence from that slant, instead of reading what is presented to make an opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-ho...