Seriously? The "Largest Gun Study Ever: More Guns, More Murder"
I have gotten a number of emails about a study in the American Journal of Public Health entitled: "The Relationship Between Gun Ownership and Firearm Homicide Rates in the United States, 1981–2010."
I don't have time to do more than glance at this paper, but here are some very superficial initial thoughts.
1) Using state level data the study claims a positive relationship between the percentage of suicides committed with guns (they call this the gun ownership rate rather than what it actually is) and the firearm homicide rate. The big problem with their measure of gun ownership is that it picks up a lot of demographic information that may itself be related to homicide and to crime.
2) Do we care about total murders or murders involving guns?
3) "None of the existing panel studies examined data more recent than 1999." Presumably this is what is causing some left wing outlets to claim "Largest Gun Study Ever" (at last glance the link to that article was retweeted 1,077 times). The authors seem completely unaware of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime that looked at data up through 2005 -- six years longer than they claim. Of course, my research also started with 1977, not 1981 as they did. Of course, I have also used county and city level data and have many more observations than they have. My research has run regressions with up to 96 times more observations that the 1,000 that they point to in this paper. While I account for hundreds of factors, these guys account for almost none (6 in their final reported model (23 unreported in bivariate estimates -- meaning just running one of these variables at a time in explaining firearm murder rates). It would be nice if Mr. Zack Beauchamp was notified that these authors are apparently unaware of any of my research since "1988" [sic] (they couldn't even get the year right for my first edition of MGLC).
4) No explanation is offered for why they leave Washington, DC out of their regressions. I can offer one: it weakens their results.
5) Only a very small percentage of the prison population are there for murder. Possibly a percent or two in any given year. Do changes in the share of the prison population for larceny or burglary really help explain a lot of the variation in murder rates? A more direct measure would be the arrest rate for murder and/or the number of people in prison for murder and/or the death penalty execution rate.
8) Even if all these issues were dealt with, they have completely ignored the issue of causation. Is it increased crime that results in more guns or the reverse?
I don't have time to do more than glance at this paper, but here are some very superficial initial thoughts.
1) Using state level data the study claims a positive relationship between the percentage of suicides committed with guns (they call this the gun ownership rate rather than what it actually is) and the firearm homicide rate. The big problem with their measure of gun ownership is that it picks up a lot of demographic information that may itself be related to homicide and to crime.
2) Do we care about total murders or murders involving guns?
3) "None of the existing panel studies examined data more recent than 1999." Presumably this is what is causing some left wing outlets to claim "Largest Gun Study Ever" (at last glance the link to that article was retweeted 1,077 times). The authors seem completely unaware of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime that looked at data up through 2005 -- six years longer than they claim. Of course, my research also started with 1977, not 1981 as they did. Of course, I have also used county and city level data and have many more observations than they have. My research has run regressions with up to 96 times more observations that the 1,000 that they point to in this paper. While I account for hundreds of factors, these guys account for almost none (6 in their final reported model (23 unreported in bivariate estimates -- meaning just running one of these variables at a time in explaining firearm murder rates). It would be nice if Mr. Zack Beauchamp was notified that these authors are apparently unaware of any of my research since "1988" [sic] (they couldn't even get the year right for my first edition of MGLC).
4) No explanation is offered for why they leave Washington, DC out of their regressions. I can offer one: it weakens their results.
5) Only a very small percentage of the prison population are there for murder. Possibly a percent or two in any given year. Do changes in the share of the prison population for larceny or burglary really help explain a lot of the variation in murder rates? A more direct measure would be the arrest rate for murder and/or the number of people in prison for murder and/or the death penalty execution rate.
6) "To develop a final, more parsimonious model, we first entered all variables found to be
significant in bivariate analyses (we used a Wald test at a significance level of .10) into
1 model. We then deleted variables found not
to be significant in the presence of the other
variables, assessing the significance of each variable with a Wald test at a significance
level of .05." -- The problem here is that the resulting statistical significance levels don't mean what these authors seem to think that that do. The levels of significance for a regression assume a random draw. If you 23 specifications and then pick the variables that are significant, the variables that you are picking were picked in a biased manner.
7) Six variables is what they finally include in their "Final Model." Leaving out variables that affect the murder rate will cause the other variables to act as a proxy for these left out variables. This gets back to my point (1).
7) Six variables is what they finally include in their "Final Model." Leaving out variables that affect the murder rate will cause the other variables to act as a proxy for these left out variables. This gets back to my point (1).
8) Even if all these issues were dealt with, they have completely ignored the issue of causation. Is it increased crime that results in more guns or the reverse?
Labels: public health
posted by John Lott at 12:10 PM
6 Comments:
I'd really love to get the PDF that includes the appendices where they "show their work". They really say a lot without giving any proof in the PDF you linked.
uh, table 2&3 says that "for each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of Black population, firearm homicide rate increased by
5.2%"
"for each 0.01 increase in Gini coefficient, firearm homicide rate increased by 4.6%"
both 5x the level of gun ownership.
If this study were about any OTHER issue besides guns, it would be dismissed as racist.
"Do changes in the share of the prison population for larceny or burglary really help explain a lot of the variation in murder rates?"
Also, I strongly suspect that the underlying missing variable that explains both the suicide:homicide relationship and the incarceration rate : homicide rate is drug use.
From the study "Objectives. We examined the relationship between levels of household firearm ownership, as measured directly and by a proxy—the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm—and age-adjusted firearm homicide rates at the state level."
Aside from all the other stuff pointed out, it looks like they are lumping suicides in with homicides. If that's so, and i don't know, I'd like to see the regressions done without suicide included.
Suicide is no reason to adopt restrictions on those of who who are responsible.
Dr. Lott,
I hope you may have time to look through this more thoroughly. Their lack of even a comment on your prior work seems very odd.
Perhaps a letter to the editor?
Well more guns does not equate to more crimes. But like what is said before we should implement stricter rules for acquiring firearms. This is the only feasible way of controlling guns in our country.
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