Wednesday December 26th, 2012

informationliberation.com

Lies, Damned Lies and Gun Control Statistics (Doug Newman)
Mark Twain once lamented that there were “lies, damned lies and statistics”, with the third being the most deceptive at all. I was reminded of this the other evening when examining a “hit piece” that was circulating on Facebook last Friday in the aftermath of the horrific mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

I was feeling a bit wonkish and I thought I would look up some statistics on violence and gun ownership around the world. One study I found was from the 2007 Small Arms Survey that dealt with the number of guns per capita in 177 nations around the world. The other was a 2012 U.N. study on the number of intentional homicides in nations around the world.

While I am not a professional statistician, we can conclude one thing: there simply is no correlation between the murder rates and rates of firearms ownership.