I took the Brady Scorecard numbers by State and compared them with violent crime rates by State. There's a bit of Excel work, but the end result is this:
The Brady Campaign keeps talking about "common sense gun regulation." Yet one has to wonder what's "common sense" about regulations that don't do anything about the problem they are supposed to address, namely violence. If you look at the chart, you can see quite clearly that increased gun regulation has little, if any, effect on the commission/attempt of violent crime (NB: crimes that were stopped in progress would still be counted in these statistics).
Now, I'm sure someone will grab onto the yellow triangles which do show a clear downward trend with increasing Brady score. However, that's a classic example of a spurious correlation. Firearms are involved in only 9% of rape cases (Bureau of Justice Statistics Firearms and Crime Statistics) and the difference is large enough that it must come from other causes. If anything, it illustrates how little "gun control" affects actual crime rates.
If one crunches the numbers, one can see a very small negative correlation between Brady Score and violent crime--very small. However, many random data sets will also have correlations. The correlation, however, is small and is not significant either statistically (the low bar) or practically (the high bar). The only one of those that has a "significant" (not expected by the random variations within the data) is the one for rape, but we've just disposed of there being a direct causal link in that one.
Thus, the available evidence indicates what pretty much everyone here already knew--that Gun Control has no appreciable effect on violent crime. But in particular, that the Brady Bunch's "common sense gun regulation" is worthless when it comes to crime control.
See also my livejournal page: coldservings
The Brady Campaign keeps talking about "common sense gun regulation." Yet one has to wonder what's "common sense" about regulations that don't do anything about the problem they are supposed to address, namely violence. If you look at the chart, you can see quite clearly that increased gun regulation has little, if any, effect on the commission/attempt of violent crime (NB: crimes that were stopped in progress would still be counted in these statistics).
Now, I'm sure someone will grab onto the yellow triangles which do show a clear downward trend with increasing Brady score. However, that's a classic example of a spurious correlation. Firearms are involved in only 9% of rape cases (Bureau of Justice Statistics Firearms and Crime Statistics) and the difference is large enough that it must come from other causes. If anything, it illustrates how little "gun control" affects actual crime rates.
If one crunches the numbers, one can see a very small negative correlation between Brady Score and violent crime--very small. However, many random data sets will also have correlations. The correlation, however, is small and is not significant either statistically (the low bar) or practically (the high bar). The only one of those that has a "significant" (not expected by the random variations within the data) is the one for rape, but we've just disposed of there being a direct causal link in that one.
Thus, the available evidence indicates what pretty much everyone here already knew--that Gun Control has no appreciable effect on violent crime. But in particular, that the Brady Bunch's "common sense gun regulation" is worthless when it comes to crime control.
See also my livejournal page: coldservings
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