2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
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- #501
More right wing lies...
What's the Matter With Missouri's Murder Rate?
For decades, Missouri required a permit to purchase a handgun, even from a private seller. (Under federal law, licensed dealers must conduct background checks but private sellers don't have to.) In 2007 the law was repealed -- causing a rash of murders, according to a forthcoming study we featured in White Papers & Research today:
The study [from researchers with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research], to be published in a forthcoming issue of Journal of Urban Health, finds that the law's repeal was associated with an additional 55 to 63 murders per year in Missouri between 2008 and 2012. State-level murder data for the time period 1999-2012 were collected and analyzed from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system. The analyses controlled for changes in policing, incarceration, burglaries, unemployment, poverty, and other state laws adopted during the study period that could affect violent crime.
Here's some FBI data I pulled myself:
It's normal for crime stats to fluctuate here and there, but Missouri has had five straight years of abnormally high murder rates while the nation's rate has been declining.
The forthcoming study reports that states bordering Missouri didn't experience anything like this; in a similar exercise, I tried ranking all the states by murder rate as of 2006 (the year before the law's repeal) and then comparing Missouri with the two states that straddled it on the list. Illinois wasn't too far off and borders Missouri, so I included it too. I got a similar result -- starting in 2008, Missouri's rate was noticeably and consistently high:
And then there is the truth, and reality, and facts....
While it is true that the murder rate in Missouri rose 17 percent relative to the rest of the U.S. in the five years after 2007, it had actually increased by 32 percent during the previous five years. The question is why the Missouri murder rate was increasing relative to the rest of the United States at a slower rateafter the change in the law than it did prior to it. Missouri was on an ominous path before the law was ended.
Simply looking at whether murder rates were higher after the law was rescinded than before misses much of what was going on. Most likely, getting rid of the law slowed the growth rate in murders.
But there are other reasons not to accept the conclusion touted by the press.
There are currently 17 states with these background check laws, down from a peak of 19 states. Missouri is just one of them.
If you are going to insist on looking at just one state, Missouri adopted the law in 1981 and rescinded it in 2007. Why not test if the murder rate fell after 1981 and whether it increased after 2007?
Why only look at just the murder rate for this one state? Why not the overall violent crime or robbery rates?
The reason for this cherry picking is obvious. Only those conditions produced the desired results. For example, Missouri’s violent crime rate fell 7 percent faster than the violent crime rate for the rest of the United States from 2006 to 2012.
Researchers should not cherry pick one state to examine. Consider the following. You flip a coin 20 times — ten heads and ten tails. If you specifically picked just five heads, you might well conclude the coin was biased. Since most readers don’t know the data, researchers need to make clear why they are only examining a small portion of the total sample.
There is already ample research on these universal background checks acrossall the states. Indeed, the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime provided one study on this, and, unlike the Webster study, it shows no reduction in murder rates from these expanded background checks. Indeed, there was even a slight 2 percent increase in murder rates, but the result was not statistically significant.
For those interested, a discussion of the other problems with Webster’s study is available here.
If one wants to look at the impact of licensing, again there is national research, again such as More Guns, Less Crime, on all sorts of licensing rules from licenses to carry a gun to licenses to own one.
For example, if you wanted to look at what happened in one state where murder and robbery rates soared after gun licensing was imposed, look at the disaster that happened in Massachusetts.
It is presumably too much to hope that reporters will understand empirical work.
But alarm bells should always go off when only one example is studied when many places have adopted the same types of laws. Reporters should always ask themselves why that one state was examined. Why didn't the researcher even look at what happened when the law was adopted?
Unfortunately, the Webster study isn't alone. There have been a rash of recent news stories on other misleading studies funded by Michael Bloomberg as well as on the risks of guns in the home.
And again.....
And the most important point and the reason not to trust the anti gunners....
The more you talk, the more idiotic you sound.
