gun

Gun Ownership vs Homicide Rate

by with No Comment Behind the NewsMaths

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

>>For the full Spreadsheet showing all 186 countries in order of homicide rate click here
Comment
My analysis did not come out as expected. According to table I put together I can say there is no clear correlation between gun ownership % and homicide rate .  If it plays a role then I  can defiantly say it not the lead cause. The US leads the world in gun ownership and it has a high homicide rate for western countries (5 deaths per 1000) compared to say the UK which is (1.28 per 100) or Australia (1.3).  There were a number of Nordic countries such as Switzerland (45%), Norway (31.3%) , Austria (30%) that have high gun ownership that were in the lowest 10 for  homicide rates.

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.