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Epistemic status: I think I probably wrung the right conclusions out of this evidence, but this isn’t the only line of evidence bearing on the broader gun control issue and all I can say is what it’s consistent with. From a Vox article on America’s Gun Problem, Explained: "On Wednesday, it happened again: There was a mass shooting - this time, in San Bernardino, California. Then it goes on to say that "more guns mean more gun deaths, period. The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. …then uses the graph as a lead in to talk about active shooter situations, gun-homicide relationships, and outrage over gun massacres. Did you notice that the axis of this graph says "gun deaths", and that this is a totally different thing from gun murders? Gun deaths are a combined measure of gun homicides and gun suicides. Here is a graph of guns vs. And here is a graph of guns vs. The relationship between gun ownership and homicide is weak (and appears negative), the relationship between gun ownership and suicide is strong and positive.
The entire effect Vox highlights in their graph is due to gun suicides, but they are using it to imply conclusions about gun homicides. This is why you shouldn’t make a category combining two unlike things. I am not the first person to notice this. The Washington Examiner makes the same criticism of Vox’s statistics that I do. And Robert VerBruggen of National Review does the same analysis decomposing gun deaths into suicides and homicides, and like me finds no correlation with homicides. German Lopez of Vox responds here. He argues that VerBruggen can’t just do a raw uncontrolled correlation of state gun ownership with state murder rates without adjusting for confounders. This is true, although given that Vox has done this time and AI Art time again for months on end and Art all VerBruggen is doing is correctly pointing out a flaw in their methods, it feels kind of like an isolated demand for rigor. So let’s look at the more-carefully-controlled studies. Th is conte nt was creat ed with GSA Content G en er at or D emov ersion.
Lopez suggests the ones at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which has done several statistical analyses of gun violence. We start with MA&H 2002. This study does indeed conclude that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates after adjusting for confounders. But suspiciously, it in fact finds that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher murder rates even before adjusting for confounders, something that we already found wasn’t true! Furthermore, even after adjusting for confounders it finds in several age categories that higher gun ownership rates are correlated with higher non-gun homicide rates (eg the rates at which people are murdered by knives or crowbars or whatever) at p less than 0.001. This is really suspicious! Unless guns are exerting some kind of malign pro-murder influence that makes people commit more knife murders, some sort of confounding influence has remained. The study gets its murder rate numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, which seems like a trustworthy source.
It gets its gun ownership numbers from… ’s interesting, it doesn’t actually have any gun ownership numbers. It says that there is no way to figure out what percent of people in a given state own guns, so as a proxy for gun ownership numbers, it will use a measure called FS/S, ie the number of firearm suicides in a state divided by the total number of suicides. This makes some intuitive sense. Among people who want to commit suicide, suppose a fixed percent prefer to use guns compared to other methods. In that case, the determining factor for Art whether or not they use a gun will be whether or not they have a gun. Hospitals diligently record statistics about suicide victims including method of suicide, so if our assumption holds this should be a decent proxy for gun ownership within a state. There’s only one problem - I checked this against an actual measure of gun ownership per state that came out after this study was published - the CDC asking 200,000 people how many guns they had as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey - and the FS/S measure fails.