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.
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:
|
|
|||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|