another way to see if there is a correlation between gun ownership and
crimes would be to see if there is any between estimated number (or
percentage) of guns owned "illegally" and crime rates.
------------------------------------------------------
Dharmarajan Hariharan
Ph. 304 293 2111X2420(Dept.)3042932111 X 2404 (Lab.)
304 296 2590(Res.)
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On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, david friedman wrote:
> 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/
>
