Category Archives: States

Gun Deaths and Religion

Gun Facts Posted on 2023/03/31 by

I once joked that San Francisco was “spiritually horny.” It is true, being the birthplace of the Church of Satan, home of Jim Jones, and containing the largest concentration of upper-middle-class white Buddhists on the planet. And a lot of Catholics. Between the Spanish missions and a flood of Irish, you often can tell how many miles you have driven in California by how many Catholic churches you have passed. It also explains California’s low “gun death” rate. Takeaways Religious affiliation changes suicide statistics Places with higher percentages of Catholic and non-Christian congregants have fewer suicides. Since guns are a favored American means of suicide, this ripples into lower gun suicide rates and thus lower “gun death” rates. The Culture Clues Culture is the major determinant variable for violence, including violence upon oneself. In our book “Guns and Control”, we made the following cultural comparison: Last time I checked, the … Continue reading →

Newsom’s Gun Gaff

Gun Facts Posted on 2023/02/24 by

“California has the toughest gun safety laws in the nation.” —Gavin Newsom Problem is, it has made no difference. Take-aways California’s suicide rate is low due to demographics. California’s gun homicide rate is slightly below average and tied with states with nearly no gun laws. Gun laws and gun homicide rates do not correlate at all, denuding claims about “toughest gun safety laws.” The suicide slide

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California Con

Gun Facts Posted on 2022/07/24 by

There must be an election coming. The current California governor is making presidential maneuvers and the New York Times appears to be propping up his (inaccurate) statements about guns. I lived in that politician’s home turf for 22 years, during his political rise, so I have a deeper than average interest – and knowledge – of what the reality is, and in which alternate reality the politician resides. Main Take-aways California’s gun homicide rate is exactly the national average. Their overall suicide rate is rising, but is 29% lower that national averages, which bends the curve on gun suicide rates. For mass public shootings, California has 17% more incidents and 60% more deaths than the national average. The New York Times agitprop In a rather choice bit of partisan hackery, the New York Times (NYT) makes the following assertions about California and guns.

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Permit Punditry

Gun Facts Posted on 2021/09/19 by

North Carolina is thinking about ending its Jim Crow era law requiring a permit to purchase a handgun. Naturally one side claims that an Armageddon of gun play will follow. The other side is saying “Oh, calm down, you Dixiecrats.” Who is right can be demonstrated with surprising ease. Major Take-Aways Purchase permits do not impede gun violence and might encourage it. Lack of such permits do not increase gun violence. The Purpose and Unspoken Purpose of Handgun Purchase Permits The common justification for purchase permits is so that the local constabulary (typically the county sheriff) can ensure that only non-criminal types can obtain a permit and thus buy a handgun at retail outlets (gun stores today, hardware stores back when many of these laws were originally enacted). Most states went further and disallowed private sales of handguns without a permit, often enforced by also requiring the private sales to … Continue reading →

Background Checks and Homicides

Gun Facts Posted on 2021/04/20 by

If retail gun purchase background checks are any indication, sales of guns may keep some crime down. Backgrounds Checked The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) recently released a report on background checks. Though not every state was covered, the 40 reported gives of an unexpected view into homicides and recent gun sales. But before we dive in, here is the list of caveats: Only looks at 2016/7 data, so a snapshot in time. Gun sales may lag behind changes in local violence, so there is an unspecified lead/lag issue. Since the BJS also tells us that a minimum of 40% of crime guns come from street sources (not subject to background checks), looking at retail checks and crime might produce weak results anyway. Up, Up and Away Between 1999 and 2017, the U.S. population rose 16% while the number of background checks for gun purchases rose 99%. Clearly, America has … Continue reading →

Ammo Background … Checked

Gun Facts Posted on 2021/01/16 by

The Gun Facts project received a provocative question: “We’ve had a few years of California’s Prop. 63. Can we point to any numbers that show whether the ammo background check law is having the desired effect?” The answers are: “Yes, we have numbers; no, it didn’t have an impact; but there are a lot of gotchas in the analysis.” The two experimental states Both New York and California passed laws that require criminal background checks before you can buy firearms and gun ammunition from a gun shop. New York passed their law in 2013 and California in 2017. These two states –The State of COVID and the State of Emergency – passed these measures along with other gun control actions (California, for example, established procedures for enforcing laws prohibiting firearm possession by specified persons), so it is technically impossible to weed out just ammunition retailing as a factor. But we … Continue reading →

Cali Suicide Calumny

Gun Facts Posted on 2020/06/13 by

“Bury the lede” is an old newspaper trade term for not disclosing the interesting part of the story until so late in the article that few people read it. Paragraph #1, Senator Bedfellow gave money to a shelter for battered women; paragraph 48, Senator Bedfellow was charged with wife beating in 2006. It is a propaganda tactic, and it is used too often in gun policy research. In this case concerning suicides in California, the stunt was aided and abetted by the California government. Woe, thy name is Wintemute Long ago, a doctor with zero criminology credentials started publishing on gun control topics. His early research was, in a word, hilarious. One chunk of his intellectual effluvium used “observational evidence” about people at gun shows in two states. Generalized, the assumption the doctor made was that if Bill asked his friend Ted about a firearm for sale at the gun … Continue reading →

California-Nevada Gun Shows – Not What The Media Reported

Gun Facts Posted on 2017/11/12 by

Page 10 in the appendix is a handy place to put a statement like: No significant relationships existed between gun shows and firearm injuries along known trafficking routes or when California’s 10-day waiting period was excluded. That is where one of many key clues about the lack of viability of a recent piece or research was filed. That tax money from the federal (NIH) and California (U.C. Berkeley) governments was used to generate this paper and the minor media frenzy that followed should give voters something to consider at election time. Key takeaways Raw data shows lower rates of California death and injury after gun shows. Even after questionable adjustments to the data, rates of change in gun misuse were small, possibly within random variations. Controls for other influences (confounding variables) were odd and incomplete. Unexplained, undocumented adjustments leave the quality of the research in grave doubt. No verification that the misused guns … Continue reading →

Target on Taradiddle

Gun Facts Posted on 2016/10/27 by

New York’s attorney general produced a report on crime guns and their alleged rates of trafficking. I cannot say the report is flawed. Instead I must ask “Sweet Jesus, what kind of medications was he swallowing wholesale?!?!?” Major Take-Aways: Half of the crime guns had insufficient data to complete their analysis, so they ignored it. Most crime guns, by an overwhelming margin, still come from New York itself. The report claims that a full half of crime guns come from inside New York. In-state sourced crime guns exist despite New York having so-called “universal background checks“. No attempt was made to study guns that enter the state via normal human relocation, instead assuming such movements were intentional trafficking. Used an arbitrary and statistically inept scoring system to create a “trafficking index”. Demonstrated that their key indicator for trafficked guns accounted for a minority of recovered crime guns. Brushed-over the fact that the lion’s share of crime guns are recovered … Continue reading →

Missouri Misstep

Gun Facts Posted on 2016/01/08 by

Hokum requires a bit of magic. A popular con circulating in the gun control debates is that when the state of Missouri repealed their law requiring a permit to buy a handgun, that homicide shot up. Sadly, nobody told the FBI and the folks there who run the Universal Crime Reporting database. Sadly, too, few reporters have found the online portal to this data, otherwise the meme might never have lived longer than the Bloomberg School of Public Health press release.   So how did this formerly illustrious school pump forth this effluvium when the raw numbers do not support the claim? It all comes down to math. In the press release for the study, they note that they too pulled data from the FBI crime database. But they also note that “the analyses controlled for changes in policing, incarceration, burglaries, unemployment, poverty, and other state laws adopted during the … Continue reading →