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Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A review of international and some domestic evidence

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The results of a study published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (a conservative peer-reviewed law review) point to a negative correlation between gun ownership and violent crime. The comparison of murder rates in industrialized nations is of particular interest.

 

Check it out:

 

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

 

 

An article on Breitbart.com alerted me to this publication, but the Breitbart article incorrectly identifies the research as "a Harvard" study. To be clear, the study was conducted by criminologists external to Harvard, and the results of the study were published by a Harvard scholarly journal.

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It sounds pretty painful if you survive such event....

You don't...... Generally people jump in front of the high speed trains and bits and pieces are spread for 1/4 mile along the tracks. It's really ugly.

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A thorough and informative study published by a prestigious source but those dead set against firearms of any kind are hard swayed by facts and studies of any pedigree as I've personally found. I will hang on to this one however....Thank you.

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You don't...... Generally people jump in front of the high speed trains and bits and pieces are spread for 1/4 mile along the tracks. It's really ugly.

Most of the suicides are on the Main Line, Bergen County Line, and North Jersey Coast Line. High speed trains on the Corridor are fenced off. High speed fatalities are indeed a mess though.

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You don't...... Generally people (trespassers) jump in front of the high speed trains and bits and pieces are spread for 1/4 mile along the tracks. It's really ugly.

 

fixed your post.

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What this study found is that countries with restictive gun laws have much higher overall murder rates, with England and Russia as prime examples. Gun anti's love to quote the gun murder rate, but deliberately choose to ignore the overall murder rates as proof that gun ownership actually deters violent crime. In these countries, people are beating, strangling, and stabbing each to death other at much higher rates. Right now in Russia, the overall murder rate is 4 times higher than in the US  and with England it is difficult to determine due to mysterious methods that the English use to report murders(but definitely much higher than they actually report as murders), and private ownership of firearms has been almost eliminated in both countries. The study also supports the premise that in states in the US that easily issue CCW permits, violent crimes rates are declining more rapidly and lower than states that do not issue them due to the fact that criminals choose not to commit confrontational crimes out of fear that their victims could be potentially armed. Read the study results on the link posted by the OP, it is enlightening.

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I need to be a bit of a buzz-kill here.

 

I'll post the summary  of why below:

 

Source (with better formating): http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1lbu4p/gun_bans_dont_mean_lower_murder_rates_finds/cbxqe2o

 

"This is not a peer-reviewed study, and it's filled with blatant errors. Below is a debunking I've written in the past, and with a bit of scrutiny, it's quite easy to find more errors and fallacies.

To start, the journal it was published in. It's actually a student-run law review, as the website points out:

"The Journal is one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship."

Far more important, however, is what it does with the data. Some examples below.

It claims that Luxembourg had a murder rate of 9.01 per 100k population in 2002 (table 1), and uses that as an argument in several places:

"For example, Luxembourg, where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002." (p. 652)

"As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest, individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use." (p. 661)

"France has infinitely more gun ownership than Luxembourg, which nevertheless has a murder rate five times greater, though handguns are illegal and other types of guns sparse;" (p. 674)

A compelling argument, that suffers from just one, small flaw: it's false.

 

Eurostat data on homicide in Europe show that there were 4 murders in Luxembourg in 2002 - a homicide rate of about 0.9 per 100k population. And those data show that the numbers were similar for surrounding years.

 

Kates and Mauser got their European data from this report:

"The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Homicide in Canada, Juristat, 2002."

That report contains one table containing data of some countries other than Canada, presumably for purposes of comparison. As its source, it only lists "National Central Bureau - Interpol Ottawa", without referring to any documents, reports or studies. Apparently, at one point a decimal error snuck in - sloppy, but somewhat forgivable since the non-Canadian data weren't the subject of the report.

 

But why did Kates and Mauser choose to use reports on "Homicide in Canada" for a study that doesn't actually use any Canadian data? And why did they fail to verify that hugely unexpected number on which they based several claims?

 

Plus, why didn't they notice that the source they used for table 4 shows a murder rate of 0.7/100k for Luxembourg just a few years earlier, and take that as a sign that just maybe they should verify the 9/100k number?

 

The most charitable interpretations would involve either negligence or incompetence. And it goes on. Here are some select murder and suicide rates, as given in tables 4 and 5:

 

Countries murder murder w/ handgun suicide suicide w/ handgun Italy 1.7 1.7 8.2 8.2 Sweden 1.0 1.3 15.3 15.3 Holland 1.2 1.2 12.8 12.8 Belgium 1.7 1.7 18.7 18.7 France 1.1 1.1 20.8 20.8

 

That doesn't look quite right, does it? Yet it's in there.

 

Pages 687-688, tables 4 and 5.

 

It's clear that the "murder with handgun" and "suicide with handgun" figures in table 5 are simply the murder and suicide numbers from table 4. But why did they mislabel both table 5 and its columns? And why is the number for "murder" in Sweden lower than the number for "murder with handgun" in Sweden?

 

More generally: how the hell did all of that slip through peer review?

...oh, right.

 

I could go on (it's like fishing with dynamite), but I think I've shown enough evidence to prove that this "study" features massive errors, making it pretty much worthless.

There's nothing wrong with being pro-gun, but bad science has no place in reasonable debate. And this... this is as bad as it gets."

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Harvard seems to think the journal is peer reviewed (maybe not faculty edited). "These peer reviewed publications . . . " http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/orgs/journals/
 
The average Washington and Lee ranking of this law review over the past few years was like 30, so its hardly a glorified student newspaper. The Journal has a couple of US Senators and several US Court of Appeals judges as advisors.

 

The Harvard Law Review (often sited as the source of Obama's legal credentials) is an equivalent legal review from Harvard.

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Harvard seems to think the journal is peer reviewed (maybe not faculty edited). "These peer reviewed publications . . . " http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/orgs/journals/
 
The average Washington and Lee ranking of this law review over the past few years was like 30, so its hardly a glorified student newspaper. The Journal has a couple of US Senators and several US Court of Appeals judges as advisors.

 

The Harvard Law Review (often sited as the source of Obama's legal credentials) is an equivalent legal review from Harvard.

 

 

No.

 

It's an self-proclaimed conservative club used for building students legal writing skills. It's child science. The story was shared by the admittedly biased Breitbart (the right-wing equivalent of Huffington Post). Simply because it has Harvard letterhead doesn't mean it's anything more than a biased, student based, practice piece.

 

As much as I want to believe the premise of the "study", I just can't.The errors are simply too blatant and too numerous for it to be taken seriously and citing it as if it has any serious credibility makes it look like us pro-gunners are grasping at straws.

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Duh, it's not legal, but neither is the present practice of denying carry permits in NJ. The point is, the end game for the Left is to effectively ban gun ownership ala United Kingdom.

 

 

What would Obama do?

 

Draw a red line and bomb them is my guess. And he's a pussy.

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Suicide by train is up like 20% or so this year in nj....

 

 

 

 

BAN THOSE EVIL LOCOMOTIVES

 

 

This signature exceeds the 15 character capacity

 

i know everyone who does it picks whatever method for some reason or another... but really? people jumping in front of trains? guess they want to make sure it gets done right..

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