On Fri, 15 Jan 2016 17:30:45 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
It's the WHO figure. Your figures for other countries agree with it
quite closely:
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/germany
-or-
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compare/194/rate_of_gun_homicide/69
-and-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate#List
Also, Wikipedia quotes a German-language official report that produces
a somewhat lower figure, here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland#Gun_crime
Here is the gun homicide rate for Switzerland. It's 0.23/100k, not
0.6:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
>
>.<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country#/media/File:GunsPer100_10052015.png>
>
>
> >> UK: 0.05 homicides per 100K people per year, 6.6 guns per 100 people.
> >>
> >>
> >> To summarize, if guns cause homicide, Switzerland should have
> >> 45.7*(3.5/88.6)= 1.81 homicides per 100K people per year.
> >
> > First, who said that guns "cause" homicide? Second, where did you get
> > the idea that the relationships are straight multiples? They're not.
> > The trendlines are clear, but there are no simple multiples.
>
>In the original thread from which this came, exactly such a correlation
>was implied (by comparing murder rates with gun ownership rates, based
>on the unstated false assumption that Europeans are all disarmed) and I
>was refuting the assumption and implied correlation.
Well, there is no direct multiplier, although there is a correlation.
>
>
> >> But Switzerland has 0.23/1.81= 12.7% of the predicted rate, call it one
> >> eighth.
> >
> > And who made that prediction? You?
>
>Yep. Classic back-of-the-envelope analysis of plausibility. Did you
>get a different answer?
I didn't assume a straight multiplier. The answer I was looking for
was the overall correlation, which we worked out last year or so in
basically the same argument. It was on the border between "positive"
and "very positive."
>
>
> >> Off by a factor of eight. Hmm. It would appear that something
> >> critical is being missed in the above analysis.”
> >
> > There is. see below.
> >
> >>
> >> Unlikely that things have changed much in the last six months.
> >>
> >> Joe Gwinn
> >
> > First, Joe, we ran the correlation coefficient here a year or so ago
> > and showed that it's quite high. There's no question about the general
> > relationship between rates of gun ownership and gun homicides between
> > countries, within a general type of culture.
>
>Could you point me to the details of that analysis? I don't recall the
>details.
No, I don't keep that stuff.
>
>Also, some perspective:
>
>The listed homicide total for the USA is listed as 14,827 in 2012. For
>comparison, the traffic-related death rate is 11.6 per 100K in 2012,
>which corresponds to a total of 36,166 per year.
>
>Medical errors are three times as dangerous:
><
http://www.propublica.org/article/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-us-hospitals>
>
>Arguably, we should be spending most of our energy on doctors and
>automobiles.
We are. Billions of dollars and many thousands of people. How much are
we spending on gun safety? I already pointed out that we've reduced
automobile deaths per mile by a factor of about 5 since 1960.
>
>
> > If you're going to throw
> > in failed states and narco states, you get a different set of
> > relationships.
>
>I never knew that those European states were narco states. Now it can
>be told. Well, they do have narco problems, and it's a slippery slope...
What are you talking about? Germany and Switzerland, which were your
examples, are neither narco states nor failed states.
Now, throw in Central America and Africa, and you'd have some of both.
And your correlations would swing all over the place. That's what I
was referring to.
>
>
> > Second, you aren't accounting for the MUCH stricter qualifications for
> > gun *ownership* in Switzerland, and the general strictness of gun laws
> > there (I lived in Lausanne for almost a year, so that country is one
> > I've followed and of which I have first-hand experience).
>
>Well, the qualifications in Switzerland are so strict that only one half
>(basically all males) of the population possesses a *real* military
>assault rifle (SIG SG550).
Nowhere near it. The population of Switzerland is 8,230,000. "In some
2001 statistics, it is noted that there are about 420,000 assault
rifles (fully automatic, or "selective fire") stored at private homes,
mostly SIG SG 550 models." (The number actually has gone down since
then.)
That's 5%, not 50%. You're having a decimal-point problem this
evening. <g> You also don't know how that all works. It's not worth
getting into it, but suffice to say that only ACTIVE militiamen of a
certain age range and who live in certain conditions have select-fire
military rifles in their homes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
Every single one is registered and must be presented for inspection
every year, BTW. If you allow it to be stolen, you're going to jail.
If you loan it to someone, you're going to jail.
>
>I lived in Sweden for a year in the mid 1970s, and have been there many
>other times, probably in aggregate at least another year. In Sweden,
>all healthy males are conscripted at 18, so essentially all males know
>how to handle a gun. They don't have a gun in every house, but a number
>of my Swedish friends had firearms through their shooting club. My
>recollection is that they had long guns, and that pistols were harder to
>get legally (but not impossible), but don't recall the details.
>
>Sweden: 0.7 murders per 100K in 2012, 3 traffic deaths per 100K in 2012,
>and 31.6 guns per 100 people. Medicine probably like the US.
>
>
> > You can make more sense of these relationships if you compare
> > MacIntoshes to Granny Smiths, rather than figs to strawberries. That's
> > why I was talking about Europe. The pattern of gun-purchase and
> > -ownership laws there tend to be more alike than between, say, the US
> > and the UK. Here, I'd compare us to Canada and maybe to Australia.
>
>The better argument is that in Europe, the insane are kept in the locked
>wards of state hospitals, rather than left to fend for themselves, often
>on the streets. And handling an insane family member vastly exceeds the
>resources of most families.
It's only an argument if you can support it with specifics. The
percentage of health care expenditures for mental health in Europe is
less than 5% of the total. It the US, it runs around 6%. (Look up
"Mental health policy and practice across Europe." It's a PDF and I
can't easily get you a URL, but it's easy to find.) The US figures
also are easy to find, from the CDC, the NIH, and elsewhere.
So, if you have some evidence that they're doing a better job of it in
Europe, we haven't seen it. In fact, that paper I just mentioned says
they're doing pretty lousy.
--
Ed Huntress