Category: Guns

Our opponents are currently going hog wild over a blog post appearing Art on the Issues, by Dr. Art Kamm. I suspect they like it because Dr. Kamm runs some numbers which make gun ownership look weak, but I find his methodology suspect:

In examining the crude firearm homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in countries that have a population exceeding 3.8 million and a GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power, in excess of $20,000 (World Health Organization, 2002), the US rate dwarfs that of any other industrialized country(ref).  The firearm homocide rate in the US was 5.5 times higher than Italy (the next highest) and several European Union countries reported insignificant levels of firearm homicides: only 45 were reported in the UK, 15 in Denmark, 10 in Norway, and 7 in Ireland.  Whereas the US reported a total of 10,801 firearm homicides in 2000, the European Union, having a population of over 376 million (exceeding that of the US) reported only 1,260 firearm homicides.  And in Japan, where less than 50 handguns were present (they are reserved to athletes participating in international shooting competitions), only 22 firearm homicides were reported.

Why is it legitimate to only examine homicide by firearm? Isn’t a better measure overall violent crime, or perhaps homicide in general? I’ve done some calculations on homicide rates as to whether there’s correlation to levels of gun ownership in industrialized countries (defines as GDP > 14,000) and there was none. I even threw out countries that would have made my numbers better, because they were highly undemocratic, or unstable.

What Dr. Kamm is doing here is essentially proving, to take this to another context, that countries that have a higher ownership of automobiles per capita have a higher rate of fatal accidents. That is hardly startling, given it takes owning an automobile to have a fatality with one, but it would tell us little overall about the dangers of automobiles compared to other forms of transportation. The question is whether firearms ownership has any effect on violent crime overall. I’ve found you can get correlation, but only by reducing the size of the sample set by choosing an arbitrarily high number for GDP, which excludes virtually all of Eastern Europe (some of which have high gun ownership rates, but low murder rates, and some which have very low gun ownership rates, and very high murder rates.) Barron Barnett has done some excellent work in this area as well on the domestic front.

I also note Dr. Kamm mixing firearms homicides (which does not include suicide) and firearm deaths (which does). As I’ve mentioned before, treating firearm suicide as a reason for restricting the rights and freedom of others is inappropriate in a free society. Research also bears out that internationally there is no correlation between gun ownership and suicide rates.

Dr. Kamm’s research on NRA’s funding sources is also very poor. A quick analysis of their publicly available form 990s (some of which I’ve done here, in a different context) show that NRA gets the vast majority of its funding from its individual members, rather than from corporations or large donors. While NRA’s recent efforts in seeking larger donors are paying off, its bread and butter is still fundraising from its membership base, much to the chagrin of many of its members. Dr. Kamm also fails to note that MidwayUSA, the largest corporate donor to NRA, raises that money through a “round up” program, that asks customers to round up to the nearest dollar to support NRA. This money may have a corporate source, but its a grassroots effort. It is not something easily matched by our opponents, because there’s no anti-gun shop, where you could source “round up” donations from.

Our opponents are far more reliant on donations from large foundations than NRA is. That they don’t come close to matching our grassroots muscle is probably the reason may of them are angry, bitter, and lashing out.

CSGV took something I said out of context, and then we get a great example of how they don’t want to take our guns. In truth, I don’t worry that they will. They quite frankly don’t have the political power. I haven’t really been able to figure out if the folks at CSGV are genuinely mad and offended, or they are just poking their foaming at the mouth followers with a stick in hopes of making something happen.

Unfortunately this is what leads our country down the path to nasty discourse, and where we can no longer have reasonable people agreeing to disagree. How can you agree to disagree with someone who wants your friends and fellow citizens in jail and ruined, as we can see in the example here and here? These aren’t people who are just concerned citizens. They are hate filled people out to destroy lives. How are these people different from a bigot who would enjoy the idea if a black man got an ass beating because he was visiting Mississippi in 1954, and didn’t know certain fountains weren’t for his kind? I posit they are no different in terms of their corrupt character, only in the form of bigotry they have chosen.

I’ve noticed the Brady folks keep touting the picture of their vigil from Conowingo, MD. My guess is because it’s their biggest crowd at any of the events, and it photographed well. The rest of the pictures features your prototypical close ups, or one-off snapshots, probably to conceal the fact that there was very low turnout at most events. I mean, the Pittsburgh event featuring CeaseFirePA looks like a pretty decent house party. It’s no surprise that Heeding God’s Call turned out the usual suspects in Philadelphia. Reading wasn’t too bad a crowd.

I count about 33 people in the headlining event crowd in Conowingo. The unescapable fact for the Brady Campaign and other groups is these are pathetic turnouts. Dennis wants to know whether politicians are listening. They are not. They should not. At my club, we get a better turnout for air gun matches when Larry is making his famous New England clam chowder than the Brady’s got at Conowingo. My club this summer had a picnic that turned out four hundred, and that’s only because we capped it. The area gun shows on any given weekend draw thousands.

Whether the antis want to accept it or not, this is why we’re listened to, and they are ignored. There are simply a lot more of us than there are of you. Time to start facing facts.

From our favorite Brady Board member, in her own comments:

Should we just not do anything? That is not what this country does. When there is a national public health and safety problem, people get to work. They pass laws, they educated, they do something. Seatbelt laws, no smoking laws, breast cancer and colon cancer screenings- all national efforts to get people to take better care of themselves or to mandate things that will make people safer and cut costs to health care, etc. We haven’t even tried with guns so how would we know?

Sometimes nothing is exactly the right thing to do. I don’t get this “We have to do something,” mentality. Especially when something generally involves restricting people’s liberty in the cases of smoking bans and seatbelt laws. I think this is really what probably separates our two sides; we value freedom and they want to be relieved of the burdens of it. I think this more now that we have interacted with them more.

Note the comparison to breast cancer screening and colon cancer screening. Would Joan Peterson favor mandating these? With long prison sentences for failing to show up to your scheduled screening? Because that’s what using gun control to solve the problem of violence means. Maybe she would. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. But to borrow some of their lingo in a different context, as a cancer victim and survivor myself, having lost my mother to it, I would never advocate mandating such things. Freedom is more important than saving the lives which would be saved by mandatory screening with stiff penalties for non-compliance. I think most other folks would agree.

But there’s one difference here. There’s reliable scientific evidence that early screening greatly increases cancer survival rates. There’s absolutely no evidence at all that gun control reduces violence crime or murder.