There are a lot of ways to spend Christmas Day. You can spend it with family opening gifts. You can use it as excuse to have a nice peaceful meal at a Chinese restaurant. If the weather is nice, maybe you can go for a hike. The one thing that would never occur to me is to shoot somebody. But 63 people got shot and 27 people were killed on Christmas Day. There were even mass shootings, one in Jacksonville, Florida, and another in Mobile, Alabama.
You’d think that maybe we could have a day off from this mayhem, but we can’t.
The number of Americans killed in gun homicides on Christmas Day is comparable to the number of people killed in gun homicides in an entire year in places like Australia or Britain. The 27 people killed by guns in America on Christmas this year is equal to the total number of people killed in gun homicides in an entire year in Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland, combined.
Maybe we can relax more gun laws in response. This seems like the only response we’re capable of making.
Our culture of fear continues to breed more gun owners and more targets, real or imagined. There was a news report the other night on NBC about new Open Carry laws being passed in Texas. One of the gun owners reasoned that having his gun holstered at his side made him feel safer because it sped up his draw time. WTF? Have these idiots been watching Gunsmoke reruns? Who needs a slap-and-draw now?
The onus is now on shop and business owners to post No Guns Allowed signage. It makes me uncomfortable to see someone strolling by with a revolver at his side. I hate living in a society that is so afraid and at the same time so aggressive that their needs outweigh those of innocent citizens who don’t want to be caught in a crazed crossfire.
It’s a nightmare.
“… to breed more gun owners ..”
Actually, gun ownership is down VERY significantly since the ’70s. Fully one half of adults owned at least one gun in the late ’70s to about one-third today.
But how many are carrying?
Read this for some sickening commentary, including Virginia as a Communist State, not to mention the provocative title. See if you can find my comment. I’m surprised it hasn’t been HR’d out of existence.
Trouble is, a lot, in my opinion, of the people who do own guns these days are crazy, belligerent, fearful, RW-Koolaid-guzzling Rambo wannabes. They’re the ones who amass arsenals, sloppy-carry to the point of shooting themselves (yay!) or innocent others (damn) by boneheaded actions or failures to control their weapons, get off on using open carry to intimidate and annoy the libtards and Those People, and in general make themselves as obnoxious as possible to the rest of us — including non-insane gun owners, who have no more power to rein in the gun nuts than anyone else.
Out of all of the gun rights expansion legislation coming out of the states, this is the one that is just so back-asswards:
My mom was still alive and in a rural nursing home in my state when Obama was elected. The very first legislative session here following his election was in March, when the first of what was to become a raft of gun rights expansion laws were passed, In that first round of gun laws was one which allowed gun owners to open carry into any facility where signage was not posted expressly forbidding it.
The nursing home attached to the hospital got a real shock when a gun owner walked in carrying a gun and when security there approached him they found out it was the gun carrying idiot’s right. So, only then did the hospital and nursing home start posting signs at their entrances to advise that guns were not allowed to be open carried. The young administrator at the nursing home was not mad at the gun owner;she was just caught off guard. Told me that the person didn’t mean anything by it. Absolutely, effing ridiculous!
The Guardian – Guns top Christmas wish lists and the industry seems to be booming . Thus, what could be more Christmasy and give the finger to the “war on Christmas” than gun violence on Christmas day?
The really sad part of this is the numerous amount of very young children killed by their gum owning parents negligence. Yes I agree the mass shootings are awful, but a young child killed for a parent or family member left a loaded weapon out for them to find is inexcusable.
By the way several of these accidental shootings involved firearms left out by police officers. One would thing that the police would know how to proper store a firearm.
Equally sad — Arizona father fatally shoots his two daughters before attempting suicide. Far too common and disproportionately it’s the father and not the mother that shoots and kills their own children.
While I agree that guns are a terrible problem in the US, I can’t abide bad statistical analysis. The total sum of the populations of the chosen counties is 8% of that of the US. Homicide rates per capita should be the comparison, and restricting to only gun homicides does not give an accurate picture of the “mayhem factor” , if you will, in given countries. At 3.8 intentional homicides per 100,000 per year, the US has more mayhem, than say, Norway at 2.2, but give me a break, using Estonia as a comparison? Their rate is 7. Iceland is currently the safest place on the list (as long as you are leaving out suicide), with .3 homicides per 100000 per year.
: and by chosen countries I was referring to : Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland.
There’s still too much violence in the US of course, caused partly by guns, but also by our dumb cartoon macho culture.
A study about statistics of homicide labeling in Estomia …
○ Homicide statistics in Estonia [pdf]
“The latest figure for intentional homicides in Estonia is for the year 2009, during which 7.0 such criminal offences (attempts included)
were committed per 100,000 inhabitants. With attempts excluded, the corresponding indicator was 5.2.”
The comparison was 1 Day in the US to the annual number of gun homicides in other countries. Adjusted for population AND number of days in a year, and the US comes out even worse than in this in this illustration.
?? I think you missed my point, small as it is. The US has 12 times the population of the other listed countries. One would therefore expect 12 times the total number of gun homicides, all other things being equal. The actual number is much larger than that, but it is not 365 times larger, as implied by the article. Also, focussing only on gun homicides skews the result.
I get your point, and as someone that often objects to sloppiness in reporting comparative numbers, this one is fine because it reveals the truth. And to be fair, data collection on homicides and gun violence in this country isn’t all that good.
27 gun homicides on Christmas Day is below the average of 30.9/day according to the CDC.
That would not include firearm suicides which we know aren’t rare in firearm homicides.
wrt your other point:
IOW, close to 70% of US homicides result from firearms.
What frosts me about comments like your’s is that you didn’t bother to find and present the more complete information on homicides that you complain weren’t included in the story. List of countries by intentional homicide rate. The UK, one of the countries cited by Martin, rate is 1 (practically no firearm homicides). US non-firearm rate in 1.6. And on top of that is the 3.5 rate for firearm homicides. Why wouldn’t we want to focus on the extraordinary rate of US firearm homicides?
I forgot to add the link you have given, which is the same place I obtained the homicide figures I quoted. As for population figures, I used Wolfram Alpha and performed the required sums in Mathematica.
To your point on focussing on firearm homicides, nothing wrong with that but focussing only on firearms homicides, in an article that quotes Bermuda or Estonia as exemplars of safe societies, is bad analysis IMO.
The rates in that list are based on population/100,000. No need to do any calculations. However, the 3.8 rate given for the US is considerably below the 5.1 rate reported by the CDC. The World Bank report appears to be more accurate, but suffers somewhat in that only whole numbers are reported.
That said, Estonia appears to have a homicide rate equal to that of the US while its gun homicide rate is rare. Slovenia, OTOH, has a low homicide and gun homicide rate as does Austria, Australia, Iceland and the UK. So, including gun homicides from one little country with just over a million in population was slightly misleading to the larger point, and therefore, was fine to point that out. Martin still got the “forest view” correct.
I get your point. But really it shouldn’t be called “statistical analysis” at all–it’s just a journalistic hook. It doesn’t mean anything as a test of some hypothesis but it provides a vivid way of visualizing how many gun homicides we have.
One would not expect to see anything of the kind as there is no expectation that homicides of any variety scale linearly with population. In fact the expectation is that homicides do not scale linearly for pretty much any comparable reason. And that’s even with countries that can actually be compared reasonably.
Statistically the US as a whole is simply not comparable to any other country on the planet as it’s not possible to accurately establish a control or baseline attributes due to the vast differences in a staggering number of variables such that only one attribute is testable. Controlling for one variable is the hallmark of proper statistical analysis. There is simply no country that you can compare to the US that has less than 3 drastically different relevant characteristics to any other country on the planet.
The US as a whole is fundamentally unique in it’s hodge podge of geography, population density, culture, laws, racial tensions and biases, racial makeup of the population, and a whole host of economic differences.
That means for someone who claims to abhor statistically inaccurate comparisons, you sure like to make statistically inaccurate comparisons.
I don’t think the word inaccurate means what you think it means.
But if you feel that you can learn nothing by direct comparison of murder rates between the US and other countries, that’s OK. Puts you at odds with a rather large community of statisticians, doctors, and scientists but that’s OK.
I never said that there’s nothing to learn. But if you want to dig down deeper than the surface, it’s statistically impossible to say exactly why the US has a very real gun problem, and the UK doesn’t, but neither does Switzerland.
Statistical analysis is only truly useful if it informs a course of action. Statistical analysis is only accurate if it’s replicable. Statistical analysis is only replicable if it has common and agreed upon baselines and controls. Ethically, baselines and controls are only common and agreed upon if the can be scientifically established and considered relevant.
If you think that a direct comparison without controls and baselines between the US and the UK are valuable and/or viable comparisons, which would be the bare minimum before you can even begin to talk about accuracy, I’d love to see your plan to turn the US into a country of equivalent size, population density, racial makeup, similar culture, laws, religious makeup, etc. as the UK then you have something to talk about. Until then any accurate comparison between the two is going to have to have controls and baselines. If baselines and controls could be properly established to make accurate comparisons between the US and any other country then your aforementioned statisticians, doctors, and scientists would be able to reliably point to a single cause, maybe 2, that are the key differences between the US and the target of comparison with a high likelihood of identifying not just correlation but also causation.
However the afore mentioned statisticians, doctors, and scientists not just can’t identify and agree on elements of causation, not just can’t identify elements of common correlation, they can’t even agree on common controls and baselines! There simply is no common and scientifically accepted model of comparison between the US and any other country that accurately describes the real world. If the were such a model we could be more specific than the US and some other country are different countries!
Mathematical accuracy as a process and mathematical accuracy of a statistical analysis as an accurate description of a real world problem and phenomenon are two different things, but both are valid uses of the word accurate.
Your original analysis and complaint doesn’t satisfy either. Your direct complaint about the mathematical accuracy of Booman’s numbers is not mathematically accurate because it assumes a linear function when the known real world function is known to not be linear. Your complaint about the countries used doesn’t hold up either. The comparisons between the countries tell us explicitly that something can be done. The comparisons of countries tell us that things don’t have to be the way they are. What they don’t tell us are what specific policies or details about the countries under comparison are responsible for the lower gun homicide rate.
Ben Norton:
Billmon:
Billmon, surely you’ve been listening better than that to Bibi and his pals?
It’s always seemed to me, naive non-lawyer that I am, that the right to life , which is an inalienable right, should trump the 2nd amendment. I mean, the 2nd amendment has limits; we are not allowed to keep automatic weapons rocket launchers or grenades in our homes (even if we are members of a well-regulated militia they stay in the armory). So why are the limits to the 2nd amendment set so loosely in current law, given their deleterious effect on the right to life of so many innocent citizens?
I think with the right set of supreme court jurors the constitutional limits on could be considerably tightened.
Barbara Ehrenreich knocks another one out of the park – NYTimes The Selfish Side of Gratitude
Billmon on Ehrenreich’s piece:
All out of the same basket of god/the universe/my mind will deliver all good things to me.
Ehrenreich cuts through the nonsense:
Yep, quite exceptional!
US BFF – Middle East Eye – Protests in Saudi’s Qatif after execution of top Shia cleric:
And at home – TimesUnion – Gun-friendly Texas getting even friendlier
Not to worry non-Texans that visit or must travel through the state:
The Guardian
Thursday night: