Guns and Murders

Tom Kando

My previous post's title was: It's the Guns, Stupid. 

I subsequently thought: There is a simple way to prove this: Just draw up a list of places, list two variables for each place, namely (1) per capita gun ownership and (2) per capita murders, and see if there is a correlation between the two. For example, one could use a list of our 50 states for this or a list of the world's roughly 200 countries.

There is anecdotal and journalistic  evidence that states and countries with high rates of gun ownership also have high murder rates (e.g. Texas vs. Massachusetts, or the US vs, Holland). But I can't think of any  systematic attempt to correlate the two variables, using a list of states or countries. So I did it myself. It was quite simple. I chose to list countries rather than US states. To make it easier on myself I reduced the population to 45 Aimportant@ countries. I then listed each country's  rate of gun ownership and its murder rate.  This produced a bi-variate 2x2 table, on which I did a Chi Square significance test. My data are from  countries ranked by gun ownership rates  and countries ranked by murder rates

Of the 45 countries in my sample, 25 were Ahigh gun ownership@ and 20 were Alow gun ownership@ Of the same 45 countries, 17 were Ahigh murder rate@ and 28 were Alow murder rate. The table below gives the distribution of the 45 countries into 4 cells, as indicated:

                                                               Table I: The relationship between guns and murders

		MURDERS
		MANY	FEW	TOTAL
GUNS	MANY	#1) 12	#2) 13	25
	FEW	#3) 5	#4) 15	20
	TOTAL	17	28	45

 

Cell 1: High rates of gun ownership and therefore high murder rates: US, Pakistan, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Russia, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Columbia, South Africa, Jamaica, Brazil.

Cell 2: High rates of gun ownership and yet low murder rates: Canada, Finland, Austria, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, Thailand, Australia, Italy, Belgium, Hungary. Read more...