On 12/24/01 9:40 PM, "James Rogers" <jamesr@best.com> wrote:
> With respect to correlations between guns, murder, and violent crime in
> general, of all the myriads of studies of various populations around the
> world there is only one correlation that seems to be universal. That
> correlation is that there is an inverse relationship between the number of
> guns and gun owners in the general population and the violent crime rates.
I believe this statement is at best misleading; at least for the violent
crime of homicide. Here is data on homicide rate and household gun ownership
percentages taken from
http://www.cybersurf.co.uk/johnny/dunblane/homemain.html
homicide gun ownership
USA 7.6 48
Switzerland 1.2 27
Finland 3.0 23
New Zealand 2.0 22
Australia 1.9 19
Sweden 1.3 15
W.Germany 1.2 9
A reasonably strong positive association between homicide rates and the
percentage (OK, not number...) of households with guns is apparent.
It's worth taking a look at figures 1-3 of the URL if you're interested. The
document cited here is part of a UK Home Office submission to the Cullen
inquiry about the Dunblane massacre (the 1996 killing of 15 primary school
children and their teacher by Thomas Hamilton). If you need/want to look at
the full judicial inquiry findings, they are at
http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/scottish/dunblane/dunbl
ane.htm
Best,
Geraint
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