An assumption I have always had is that more gun ownership causes more murders. Recently I’ve heard some things that made me question this assumption so I have completed a little basic analysis and thought I’d share my findings.
My Analysis
I took the homicide rate per country from wikpedia (the countries were ordered by homicide rate). I then went to another website called http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region to get the % people with guns. I amended the gun ownership figures to the top and bottom and a few countries in the middle. I didn’t get all the % of gun ownership figures because it was too time consuming and I didn’t have time.
Results
Conclusion
Based on this quick bit of analysis it looks to me like war and poverty do look like they correlate with homicide rate but gun owenership does not have any appreciable correlation.
My spreadsheet can be found here
I would appreciate any thoughtful comments. If you have better data that show things in a different light then I would appreciate it if you could send it me and I’ll continue this post once I look at that.
Hey Paul, nice idea and a fun bit of research.
It might be nice to also add in average drug and alcohol intake and rates of mental health problems. Or better, go looking for similar research. I’m sure researchers have more time to dedicate to this than you 🙂
Glad you liked it. I did start off looking for research that had already been done but couldn’t find any – that said I don’t possess your supurb googling skills. I thought there would be something on the NRA’s website at lest – but no! However it is good to get the data yourself sometimes then at least you know for sure
That’s not that suprising:
Wealth/development goes hand in hand with high gun ownership* AND low homicide rates**
That doesn’t mean strict gun control has no effect.
*poor people don’t buy guns
** there are less homicides in culturally more developed countries