At 10:14 AM +0100 1/19/01, Girard wrote:
>Why not look at the statistics? Here are some :
>
>Percent of households with a handgun:
>
>United States 29%
>Finland 7
>Germany 7
>Canada 5
>Norway 4
>Europe 4
>Netherlands 2
>United Kingdom 1
>
>Murders committed with handguns annually:
>
>United States 8,915
>Switzerland 53
>Sweden 19
>Canada 8
>United Kingdom 7
>
>Murder rate (per 100,000 people):
>
>United States 8.40
>Canada 5.45
>Denmark 5.17
>Germany 4.20
>Norway 1.99
>United Kingdom 1.97
>Sweden 1.73
>Japan 1.20
>Finland 0.70
>
>Who needs long dissertations to prove that guns kill?
You might at least notice that you omitted Switzerland from your
percent of households list. Given that the figure would have been
very high--Swiss adult males from (I think) twenty to forty are
required to have firearms in the house as part of their military
obligation--you have omitted the most striking piece of contrary
evidence from your data.
That aside, you surely know that correlation isn't causation--a close
correlation between handgun ownership and murder rate might mean that
in places with high murder rates people buy handguns to protect them.
That is one of the reasons why statistics involves more than the sort
of casual anecdotal argument you are using.
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
