Statistics, damn. Belief revision, that's some hard shit.
Stats in the first comment, but, I'm going through some really hard belief revision.
Initial Hypothesis: The US is safe enough. Like how my phone is good enough, or standing on a bus to get where I need to go is good enough. Not great, but fine.
I thought this because (and this is legit), the US homicide rate has been dropping for decades. That is, we're safer than we've ever been.
Turns out, we're absolute shit. Stats in the first comment.
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Here's the statistic that made me reject that hypothesis. I took a look at the homicide rate per 100,000 in 2013 in a bunch of countries.
ReplyDeleteUK: 1.0
Australia: 1.0
Canada: 1.4
Iran: 3.9
Thailand: 3.9
US: 3.9
Mexico: 15.7
That is, our neighbors have a third the homicide rate. Ridiciulous. We're on par with Iran, and Mexico is to us and we are to Canada. And Canada's 40% more dangerous than the UK or Australia!
OK, OK, but US cities are safe, my brain says. Fine brain, here are some numbers, from 2014 for some US cities:
ReplyDeleteSt. Louis: 49.9 (top of the list)
Baltimore: 33.8
Pittsburgh: 22.4
DC: 15.9
Chicago: 15.1
Oklahoma City: 7.3
New York, New York: 3.9
Chandler, AZ: 0.4 (lowest on the list)
Both St. Louis and Chandler are pretty small (320k for SL, 250k for Chandler), which is expected: you get more variance in smaller places. That is, the smaller the sample, the greater the expected variance from the norm.
I live next to DC, and it is ~4 times the danger of average USA. This is unexpected! The cities aren't safe.
But wait! What about the county outside of DC that I live in? Surely, our homicide rate is low like Canada, right?
ReplyDeleteSure, it probably is. Not a lot of murders in a population of 200,000. That's stupid. Next you'll ask me if you've been murdered. Which, guess what, you haven't. Obviously.
Conclusion: The murder rate is way too high, as the appropriate comparision point is not 1960s US, with its leaded gasoline, illegal abortion, and crappy policing. Its every other country on the globe, where we all could move if the US sucks.
You might find this of interest, as you try to assemble historical trends:
ReplyDeletehttp://time.com/3739370/guns-gss-pew-gallup/
Despite the more-trumpeted "Americans own way more guns than they used to!" statistic (which may very well be true) there is some evidence that far fewer Americans are owning those guns. I wish there were better data.
I love how different these stats are. Both are going down. And the lowest is what, about a third? Fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAnd the NRA says it has ~5 million members, which is ... call it 4% of US households. That's not a huge number. I think Oliver recently said more people are at planet fitness.
Which is kind of astonishing. How does an organization of that size drive such political force.
Well, if you were looking at it from some distance ... like, if it were in 15th century france, rather than 21st century America ... would you find it hard to answer the question "How does a small, fervent organization distinguished only by the possession of lots of guns, and willingness to use them, manage to have any political influence?"
ReplyDeletesomething something musketeers?
ReplyDeletein related statistics: Over the last 50 years, how does deaths of US citizens on US soil due to the ready availability of guns in the US compare with deaths of US citizens anywhere on the globe due to war and terrorist acts?
ReplyDeleteMichael D Its actually pretty unreasonably hard to get a decent test statistic there. If we're concerned with total deaths, then there's a huge bias towards the more deaths at home than abroad; we spend most of our time here.
ReplyDeleteIf we're talking deaths per 100,000 (ie, death rate), then we'd need to figure out how to measure that. Any suggestions on how? Everything I come up with is either really hard to measure, or incredibly biased.
Any stats on on cause of death (i.e. from gun injury, accidental or deliberate)?
ReplyDeleteThe US has to among the highest in the world for those stats, and top by a very long way among populous wealthy nations.
Michael D Sure we're pretty high, that's covered in the original comments.
ReplyDeleteBut, what you're asking for is the death of US citizens abroad as compared to at home, right?
And I'm saying getting a non-biased test statistics for that is fairly hard. I'm also not sure what purpose it serves. It'd be great to know what you think that'd help test for, and then maybe a way to test it will come up.
That would show whether the cure is actually worse than the problem it's meant to fix.
ReplyDeleteAs I understand it, the purpose of the 2nd amendment was to protect the safety and security of US citizens. However it seems that in reality it has resulted in far more death and suffering than the problems/risks it was meant to address.
Is there a quantitative measure of this?
The obvious one would be to compare actual deaths due to US levels of gun ownership with actual deaths due to those things the 2nd amendment was meant to prevent.
Michael D Interesting.
ReplyDeletePositing that that is the point of the second amendment -- I don't actually think it is, but let's go with -- then how do we figure it out?
I suppose one statistic is the homicide rate of US citizens within the US as compared to the homicide rate of US citizens living abroad, as opposed to, say, vacationing. That's maybe what you meant before, but I didn't get it.
I don't know if that statistic is measured. I don't see it on some initial googling, and would adore it if you found it!
It's not just homicides, but the total number of gun related deaths.
ReplyDeleteThe USA stands out among developed nations for its rate of gun deaths: every year around 30,000 people (including around 500 children), die from gunshot wounds in the USA.
For comparison, most developed western nations have rates of gun deaths 1/4 or less that of the USA (i.e. around 23,000 less per annum for a comparable sized population).
As a benchmark, the 2003 invasion of Iraq killed (est) 30,000 Iraqi combatants.
So, the number of people who die of gunshot wounds in the USA is roughly equivalent to full scale invasion of a moderate sized state ... every year!
A major difference between the USA and other developed western nations is the USA's very liberal gun ownership laws (laws whose existence can be directly traced to the 2nd Amendment) and corresponding abundance of firearms (especially those designed for shooting people, e.g. pistols).
An obvious question is: Has it been worth it?
- What benefits have derived from the 2nd Amendment and associated laws (i.e. beyond allowing people who want to own guns to do so)?
- What costs (financial, social or otherwise) have resulted from the 2nd Amendment and associated laws?
- When you put the two answers side by side, do the benefits outweigh the costs?
(Interestingly, all the debate seems to be around the quality and relevance of the deaths and injuries side of the equation. There seems to be little, if any, debate over the benefits side of the equation, other than the repeated mantra that the USA is so unsafe and has so much violent crime, that people need weapons of violence to survive.)
That's the problem with "worth".
ReplyDeleteThe "worth" of the second amendment is almost entirely towards a privilege elite, for whom racial murder is not a crime. For them, it has for sure been worth it. But, they are murderous asshats.
The other benefit is really hard, because it is a counterfactual:
-- Did the possession of guns in the US prevent the USSR from invading? (there's some research to say so, so maybe)
Did the possession of guns in the US prevent the federal government from infringing on states rights? (probably not since 1865, but maybe?)
Figuring out how to weight those sorts of benefits is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible.
Yeah, measuring counterfactuals is almost entirely the realm of confirmation bias.
ReplyDeleteOr philosophers.
ReplyDeleteAnd, well, my current mood is empirical. Almost like an economist. Maybe not a good one, but that's how I've been thinking: set up incentives, and see what actually happens.
ReplyDeleteWith guns in the populace and a pretty lax judicial eye on murder, the incentives are pretty obvious. And we see the result.
Perhaps the 2nd Amendment was worth it ... 100+ years ago.
ReplyDeleteWhat about now?
There is an obvious cost (24,000+ deaths per annum, or 8+/100,000 citizens per annum) compared with developed nations that restrict access to guns.
What's amazed me is the scale of these deaths is literally as bad as a real war (Iraq 2003).
Seriously, excess deaths in the US from gun are equivalent to casualties from fullscale invasion of the continental US every 20-50 years [based on casualty rates from the Iraq 2003, adjusted for population size and the range of fatality estimates for Iraq 2003 ]. (The only real differences seem to be that gun ownership deaths don't make as good headlines as do singular acts of war and terrorism, and they don't affect commerce and infrastructure in the same way.)
Michael D Where'd you get 8 per 100,000? The stats I see say 3.9.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing you were looking at murder rates or something similar, whereas I was looking at total gun related deaths - because all those gun injuries, etc. are part of the cost.
ReplyDeleteSimplest place to start is what's been filed on wikipedia (...yes, I know...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
Oh, so you're including the suicides. I was specifically interested in homicide rate by country.
ReplyDeleteThe suicide rate is a huge portion of the gun deaths. I was intentionally excluding them. Guns made suicides a whole lot easier. Most suicide attempts are spur of the moment, and guns speed that up considerably.
Michael D Cool, I hadn't seen that. 538 does real good work.
ReplyDelete