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...

Are Things Getting Worse?

Tom Kando 

 Many bad things are happening in the world today. 

I sometimes feel that the world is worse off now than it has been during most of my life. I say most, because I do remember times when the world was in worse shape than it is now - notably during the first five years of my life, 1941-1945. I spent those years in Hungary. At that time, things there were similar to what they are today in the South-Eastern part of Ukraine. Budapest and its surroundings were being pulverized, annihilated, obliterated, wiped off the face of the earth. 

There have been other turbulent periods and catastrophic events affecting humanity during my life. But an awful lot of crises are currently piling up on top of each other. 

For one thing, we are in the third year of a pandemic. There have been 540 million cases and 6.5 million deaths. The US alone has had 87 million cases and 1.1 million deaths. That’s 16 % of the world, even though we only make up 4% of the world’s population. As a result, America’s life expectancy is declining. 

You might argue that we are better off with Covid than the world was with the previous pandemic - the 1918-1920 “Spanish Flu,” and you would be right. Here are the facts: The Spanish Flu infected 500 million people, a number which Covid already exceeds. However, that was 26% of the world’s population at that time, whereas Covid has only infected 7% of the world so far. On the other hand, Covid is outlasting the Spanish Flu. As far as deaths are concerned, the Spanish Flu killed about 35 million people, or 1.8% of the population of the world at the time, or one out of 56 people. So far, Covid has killed 0.08% of the world’s population, i.e. one out of every 1,200 people. Thank God for vaccines! Read more...