Yeah, I bet that got everyones attention.  I ran across this article and wondered if anyone has read and deciphered the contents.

More Guns, More Crime
Mark Duggan

In it he claims to have done scientific analysis of guns and crime rates.  His conclusions are right there in his title.

Alas, poor me with little formal education, I can not agree with or refute this article.  Anyone with the credentials want to evaluate this one?

James

I don't have the credentials but, I'll take a shot.  

He is right.

Of course, if you consider self defence to be a crime!  HA!

It sounds like he considers any Constitutionally protected Right to be a crime.

I am biased though, as I have not read the article.

I need to do a bit more research on his paper.  Lott has already come out with a few criticisms of the paper.  Duggan has three things going for him: he is a Harvard PhD, he is at the University of Chicago, and he go the paper published in a really good journal.

I think he is wrong because he has not properly accounted for neighborhood effects.  He is looking at a 10-year lag of gun magazine readership (I think he only had subscription info for one or two gun mags).  The problem is that gun magazine readership is also pretty correlated to certain demographic groups: young, ex-military, blue-collar, male.  They are the sorts of folks who will live in a marginal neighborhood, and also those demographics decribe areas that have gone "black" over time.  Think of areas like the southwest side of Chicago, Newark and other areas of close-in New Jersey, and PG County, Maryland just outside of DC.  In the past those areas were mostly white and had low crime rates.  The demographics changed fast and they suddenly have a lot of murders.  PG County, Maryland, is all suburban.  There is no inner-cityness about it, but so far this year they have had more murders than the entire Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area.

There are statistical ways to correct for these neighborhood effects.  I wonder if Duggan would give me his data set to work on?

GunLvr

GunlvrPHD

Wish I could help you.  I have a link, but when you try to download the data they want money.

[url]http://ideas.uqam.ca/ideas/data/Papers/nbrnberwo7967.html[/url]

I expect to hear people begin to refer to this study and frankly, even if I buy the book/study, it may employ statistical methods I have no training in.

James

All together now..."Anti-gun IDIOT".  So, I guess that this guy thinks that the increased violent crime in England and Australia is an NRA plot.  I think that this guy is on the HCI or VPC payroll.

Standard "socialist scientific method"- in other words, come up with the conclusion first then MAKE the evidence support it. These people actually believe in animism.