Cops Wound 9

[Plane]

Guns and the Drop in the Violent Crime Rate


By John R. Lott Jr.

September 27, 2010 1:46 P.M.


President Obama undoubtedly didn’t intend it, but he deserves some credit for the recent report that all violent crime rates dropped in 2009, murder rates by 7.4 percent, robbery rates by 9 percent: His election caused gun sales to skyrocket, and crime rates to plummet.
 
Gun sales started notably rising in October 2008, and sale really took off immediately after Obama won the presidential race: 450,000 more people bought guns in November 2008 than bought them in November 2007. That’s over a 40 percent increase in sales. By comparison, the change from November 2006 to November 2007 was only about 35,000. Over the last decade, the average year-to-year increase in monthly sales was only 21,000.
 
The higher sales continued well beyond November 2008: about 3.15 million more people bought guns in the 14 months after the election than in the preceding 14 months. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, doesn’t tell us how many guns each person bought, just the number of people who bought them. Most likely, though, gun sales rose by more than the number of people who purchased them.
 
At the same time gun sales were soaring, there was an unusually large drop in murder rates. The 7.4 percent drop in the murder rate was the largest drop in murder rates since the 1999. For those who don’t remember, 1999 — when Bill Clinton was president and Columbine occurred — was another time when gun sales soared. With Clinton domestic-policy advisers such as Elena Kagan pushing hard for more gun control, Americans were worried that more gun bans were coming; in response, gun sales soared.
 
Higher arrest and conviction rates, longer prison sentences, and the more frequent use of the death penalty all reduce crime, and so does letting victims defend themselves with guns. More certain or greater penalties make it more risky for criminals to commit crime. Victims who can defend themselves can also make committing crime more dangerous and deter criminals.
 
Americans living in the District of Columbia and Chicago have seen this phenomenon firsthand. After bans went into effect in both cities, murder rates rose dramatically. The District’s murder rates then plunged by 23 percent in 2009 after the Supreme Court threw out D.C.’s gunlock laws and handgun ban. After that 2008 decision, 70,000 D.C. residents were able to use their long guns for self-defense. As my research in the just-released third edition of More Guns, Less Crime shows, murder rates don’t fall and tend to climb when guns are banned.
 
If President Obama really understood that it reduces crime to let law-abiding citizens defend themselves, it is unlikely that gun sales would have had to increase. If the Supreme Court strikes down the Chicago gun ban this month, Americans may get to see yet again that more guns means less crime.
................

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/247897/guns-and-drop-violent-crime-rate-john-r-lott-jr

[Plane]

...............No one knows the full story behind the continuing decline in gun deaths. The aging of the population is probably a factor, as well as the decline in the drug turf wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. John Lott's book, "More Guns, Less Crime," details how violent crimes decline once states enact laws allowing law-abiding adults to obtain permits to carry handguns for protection. Yet concealed handguns account for only part of the crime decline in recent years.

One thing we can confidently exclude as an important contributor is gun control. The two main gun-control issues of the 1990s were the ban on so-called "assault weapons" and the Brady Act requiring background checks and waiting periods for handguns. Neither appears to have made a difference.

The federal assault-weapon law had nothing to do with guns' rate of fire or ammunition power. Instead, the law applied to guns with politically incorrect cosmetics such as bayonet lugs, or grips on rifles that protruded "conspicuously" from the stocks. Manufacturers simply removed the offensive cosmetics without changing the internal mechanics of the guns. Before and after the federal ban, the guns comprised only a tiny percentage of crime guns, according to firearms seizure statistics from police across the U.S.

The Brady Act had no effect on gun homicide, report Jens Ludwig and Philip Cook in the Aug. 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The only benefit the authors could find was a reduction in gun suicide (but not overall suicide) among people over age 55.

The stream of Clinton administration press releases about................ http://www.davekopel.com/2A/OpEds/More-Guns-Less-Gun-Violence.htm
..............

[Plane]

Bill Clinton Advises President Obama on Gun Control: ‘Don’t Bother’

http://www.guns.com/bill-clinton-president-obama-gun-control-7215.html


Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!


This is fun , but the numbers are slippery, I am having trouble on two frounts.

Sorces and Sorces.

Those with an axe to grind are not going to produce hard trustworthy numbers , these numbers they do produce will either be useless to me or distrusted by the other side.

Thew direction of trends is very clear, there are a lot more guns at the same time as signifigant declines in violent crimes, but the absolute size of the change and the reasons for the change are not as clear, more open to interprtetation.

[Plane]

Finally!

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/1995/95sec5.pdf

Table 5.2
Number of Firearm-Related Violent Crimes and
Shooting Victims, United States, 1994

                                                      firearms used       victims shot
                                                      to comitt crimes
Murder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . .16,305.......    16,305
Robbery and Aggravated Assault . . . .   528,575.......... 15,857*
Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  544,880.....      32,162

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2000/00sec2.pdf
2000
Table 2.10
Murder Victims
by Weapon, 1996-2000
Weapons                                     1996      1997      1998      1999      2000
Total                                        16,967   15,837    14,276   13,011   12,943
Total firearms:                          11,453   10,729      9,257     8,480     8,493
Handguns                                   9,266     8,441      7,430     6,658     6,686
Rifles                                            561        638         548        400        396
Shotguns                                      685         643         633        531       468
Other guns                                     20           35           16          92         51
Firearms, type not stated               921         972          630        799       892
Knives or cutting
instruments                               2,324       2,055        1,899     1,712    1,743
Blunt objects (clubs,
hammers, etc.)                            792           724          755        756       604
Personal weapons (hands,
fists, feet, etc.)                          1,037        1,010          964       885        900
Poison                                             8               6              6        11            8
Explosives                                      15               8            10          –            9
Fire                                              170           140           132      133        128
Narcotics                                        33             37             35       26           20
Drowning                                        24            34              28      28            15
Strangulation                                 248          224            213     190         166
Asphyxiation                                    92            88            101     106           89
Other weapons or
weapons not stated                        771           782            876     684          768


http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls

Crime in the United States
by Volume and Rate per 100,000 Inhabitants, 1991–2010

Ok this table is huge , and my hands are getting tired , follow the link if you care to see more detail.

year      Population       violent crimes        violent crime rate
1991    252,153,092     1,911,767                    758.2
2010    308,745,538     1,246,248                    403.6

Thereeeee is my point!

Twenty years ,about, and violent crime rate per capata nearly halved.

Now I will look for some better stats on gun ownership, perhaps a timeline.

[Plane]

Paul Waldman, in the final installment of his epic series about guns and the NRA (nickel summary: the gun lobby isn't as influential as you think), provides us with a surprising chart. For the last 30 years, it turns out, gun ownership has dropped steadily.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/chart-day-gun-ownership-30-year-decline

Yes , color me surprised.

......unit gun sales seem to have gone up pretty explosively between 2005-10, doubling from around 5 million per year to 10 million per year. FBI background checks, a proxy for gun sales to individuals, have gone up too.
 
So I'm not sure what's going on. Gun sales to individuals seem like they've increased a fair amount over the past decade, but the number of households reporting gun ownership has decreased a bit. Does this mean that fewer households own guns, but the ones that do own guns have more and more of them? More data please!

Oh ! hahahahahahahaha!

[Plane]

Gallup's conclusion: "A clear societal change took place regarding gun ownership in the early 1990s, when the percentage of Americans saying there was a gun in their home or on their property dropped from the low to mid-50s into the low to mid-40s and remained at that level for the next 15 years. Whether this reflected a true decline in gun ownership or a cultural shift in Americans' willingness to say they had guns is unclear. However, the new data suggest that attitudes may again be changing. At 47%, reported gun ownership is the highest it has been in nearly two decades -- a finding that may be related to Americans' dampened support for gun-control laws. However, to ensure that this year's increase reflects a meaningful rebound in reported gun ownership, it will be important to see whether the uptick continues in future polling."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/gun-ownership-soars-18-year-high-47-americans-admit-owning-gun

This looks very simular to what BsB found, much lower figures than I was expecting.

[Plane]

http://www.statisticbrain.com/gun-ownership-statistics-demographics/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/01/18/why-u-s-gun-sales-are-shooting-for-the-moon/

Back in 2009 gun manufacturers labeled President Barack Obama as the “best gun salesman of all time.” They weren’t even jesting. The FBI recorded a 49 percent rise in gun background checks during the 2008 election week compared to the same week a year earlier. Fear of coming gun-control legislation certainly helped sell those guns, though how much is impossible to say.

Indeed, this prolonged surge in gun sales has driven Sarah Brady’s group to some very creative spin; for example, Caroline Brewer, of the Brady Campaign, said, “The research we’ve seen indicates fewer and fewer people are owning more and more guns.”

Sanetti doesn’t think the Brady Campaign’s spin has a syllable of truth in it; after all, he pointed out that the NSSF’s First Shots Program (a program that holds shooting lessons for the public) has been growing fast. “Fun, new action-shooting sports, such as 3-gun and sporting clays, are also bringing in a lot of......

   I give up. The real data just is not there.
Many guns have been sold in recent years, but the increase in ownership seems too small, as if a lot of the guns were evaporating.

Either everyone who wants a gun now has two to six, or lots of gun owners arn't telling pollsters about it.

Perhaps a combination of these effects.

[sirs]

Facts to a toe tag liberal?.....kryptonite to Superman.      Nice shootin, Plane

[Plane]

Facts to a toe tag liberal?.....kryptonite to Superman.      Nice shootin, Plane

Thanks , but I didn't find exactly what I expected.
The trends are as I thought them, but I was off in estimating how steep.
Unless of course there are a lot of secretly stashed guns that make up the diffrence.

Sorta like dark matter.

[Xavier_Onassis]

People are no more in danger now than they were when Clinton or Juniorbush was president, perhaps less. People buy guns because of some emotional thing, not actual danger.

Miami has rather more gun crimes than many other places in this country. I have lived here since 1977 and never seen anyone use a gun in a crime in person, only on crime scene cameras.

It is possible that the number of guns could increase and the number of gun owners decrease, if fewer people are owning larger collections of guns.

I have no idea that this is true, but it is possible.

[sirs]

Yet the fact remains more lives are saved by the use/brandishing of a gun, than those lives taken by a gun.  At least in this country

[Xavier_Onassis]

Your "facts" are bogus.

I reject them

[sirs]

Sorry, their not my facts.  What you'd be rejecting is the FBI's facts.  But that's ok.  There's no law in embracing ignorance, so it's unlikely they'll go after you

[kimba1]

forget about rights and personal safety how about personal cost?

how much does it cost a person to own a gun AND be effective with it. I know people who do fail the requirement to just shoot the gun. It`s common to hear people complain about the cost of the bullets.

how is this not a factor?

if someone wants a upgraded broadband would giving up the gun help with the cost?

All my gun experience is work related so I go no knowledge about owning a gun

[Xavier_Onassis]

At most, the FBI only quotes statistics. It does not state that more guns is the cause. The FBI does not have statistics on the number for civilians walking around with loaded guns,. People do not indicate whether they are carrying a gun or whether it is loaded when they leave home to the FBI.