On 12/25/01 9:10 PM, "Mike Lorrey" <mlorrey@datamann.com> wrote:
> Geraint Rees wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> The above data is quite wrong. Switzerland has a 100% household gun
> ownership rate for all citizen households. It's the law, as a matter of
> fact, and large percent of those guns are machine guns. I believe the
> 27% rate reflects the rate of *handgun* ownership.
>
> Finland, similarly, according to the UN, has a 50% firearms ownership
> rate.
I stand by this data, which is from a secondary source as cited; and comes
originally from the Canadian Department of Justice. Without any sources, it
is naturally difficult to verify whether any of your statements are correct.
I'd like to thank Mike for an interesting discussion; I suggest that it's
probably more sensible at this stage to draw it to a close and return to the
original topic of the thread. Without providing factual data from verifiable
sources it is going to be difficult for those on both sides of the argument
to go further on this issue.
G
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