I know, I know, how can this be? First we learn from Bob Neer that Harvard Univ. invented Napalm on a soccer field back in the 40’s. Now they issue a comprehensive and exhaustive study of various European nations, with and without strict gun laws, and Harvard Univ. concludes that nations that have a higher percentage of their citizens with firearms, actually live in a less violent society, as does the sections of the U.S. with less strict gun laws. Even with this study, there will continue to be Second Amendment Deniers, who refuse to listen to academia, and just continue the myth that more gun control laws reduce murder rates. Below are some of the wonderful nuggets in Harvard’s study.
“where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”
“per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent”
studies across 36 and 21 nations already discussed (see link) show no correlation of high gun ownership nations and greater murder per capita or lower gun ownership nations and less murder per capita”
“the determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism. In this connection recall that the American jurisdictions which have the highest violent crime rates are precisely those with the most stringent gun controls”
The study goes on to report that interviews of convicted felons were asked what did they fear most, while they committed their crimes. By huge percentages, what the criminals feared most, was a intended victim, who was armed. No wonder why robbery is highest in areas where there are strict gun laws. The study also mentions domestic violence, and how 95% of husbands who kill their wives, have prior abuse records. Too bad the Middlesex DA did not know that, perhaps Remy would still be behind bars.
Below is the pdf file, which I hope everyone reads. This is not to say some commonsense gun laws are not necessary, don’t get met wrong. But it does strongly suggest that when law-abiding citizens, in high numbers, own firearms, crime is reduced, murder rates are much lower, and society is more peaceful. This may not be welcomed news to many of you, but this diary should be promoted, not because of the content, but because we seek truth, no matter what the cold hard facts conclude.
I found this picture. I don’t paste them into my diaries to be funny, rather, I am sick and tired of reading about women being knifed to death, robbed, and how 200,000 are sexually assaulted in this country, and those are just the reported numbers. I can think of two young women, one in Waltham, I wished took the advise of the ad below.
You.
May peace be with you this Labor Day weekend
A sharply dismissive response to this “contribution” sits at a significantly higher level than the contribution itself. Those with delicate ears might think differently.
Perhaps you have delicate ears?
Poor Dan. This is not a “Harvard University study.” It is a law review article authored by a couple of random people (neither of them affiliated with Harvard, nor in fact with any American university) and published in one of Harvard Law School’s many second-string student-edited law journals – the conservative-leaning one, unsurprisingly. I’m not expecting much of anyone – on either side – to give much of a crap about it.
As for this:
No, no it shouldn’t.
That’s for sure.
Uh, sure Dan.
to learn that darnfromwaltham completely misrepresented the provenance of this “study.” How could such a thing come to pass? It’s not like he’s done anything like this before, after all. The moderators should continue their policy of allowing him to enlighten us all with his unique insights; they are such a huge enhancement to the site.
The results of a google search on this tell a tale, too. Who’s trying to make this “study” a big deal? Breitbart.com; infowars.com; personalliberty.com; ammoland.com – all
darn’s sourcesthe usual suspects, already rounded up!I continue to suspect that danfromwaltham is gift to us from Breitbart.
The link is here.
Darnfromwaltham did not mention Boston Magazine. So much of his material clearly originates in Wingnutistan, to which that Google search provided numerous links, that unless you have some undisclosed reason to think the magazine is the source, I’m going to discount the possibility.
That’s why I provided the link, and repost it here.
I read the article at Boston Magazine well before Dan posted the link. FWIW I found a lot of correlation/causality problems with the “study”. However, I can see (given the wording and pre-correction title of the article) how it could be considered a credible study.
Yes you provided the BM link, because you read an article there. I note that the “study” is 5 years old, and the reason your BM article was written is that it has been noised about recently “specifically with firearm advocates.” The BM article makes those words in quotes into a link to hotair.com, yet another wingnut site. It is not reasonable to assume that a person with darn’s history here read about the study first at BM. It is far more likely that darn learned of it from one of his usual conservatoid sources.
wingnut conservatism–where no doubt–Dan found out about the study–and you end up smelling funny.
Every indication I had was that this was a Harvard study. Even if not directly from Harvard, and published by their second team of law students, does it make the findings in the study any less valid?
The responses above, besides the f-bomb I got, came out if the same mold that one hears from the global warming skeptics, who could say “well it’s a United Nations Report, must be bogus”, or “those college scientists are just making up data do they continue to get more and more research dollars”.
Nobody is attacking the findings, just who researched it and the second level law journal at Harvard.
Is the site still having problems when using iPads or iPhones?
is to double-check stuff. I knew before checking that you got your info first from Breitbart or some other unreliable source. But I checked any way.
Ten minutes of research turned up the following about the authors:
Don B. Kates is a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute:
Gary Mauser is a “gun enthusiast“:
These guys are ideologues. Could their research be valid? Theoretically. But why should we bother reading it? Because it supports the conservative side of gun control?
I’m sure the authors of this study have a desired outcome, just as those who research global warming do.
This study is either correct, or data was hidden or manipulated for the desired outcome. I have read how England, with their total gun ban, has 2X more violent crime per capita, than the U.S.
I believe the study is correct, when it sights social and economic factors as reasons for high murder rates in certain sections of our country. You went to UMass, right? Didn’t Louis Farrakhan give a speech there, you hear him? Well, I remember back in the day, he was in Boston and said something like “there are no drive-by’s in Lexington and Newton, but there are in Roxbury and Dorchester”. The study above says the same thing. When teen unemployment today just in the African-American community is over 40%, are you really shocked when you read about the violence in those particular communities? More gun laws won’t help.
for gun crime. Certainly, poverty and the culture that goes along with it. Geoffrey Canada has a memoir called Fist Stick Knife Gun that’s pretty illuminating about that. Gun ownership, however, leads to more deadly domestic disputes and suicides. Guns are an environmental problem. Like pollution. Personally, I don’t know how gun laws are supposed to affect gang warfare and gun crime in poor neighborhoods.
It’s not a big issue for me. I got my first gun when I was 14. I’ve never owned a pistol, but I used to hunt.
The point I was trying to make was about studies. Reading a study and analyzing its methodology takes a long time. Few of us want to invest the time sorting through something unlikely to yield any valid insights.
Anyone who insistently refers to “Obama jobs” is brazenly incapable of a careful weighing of causative variables or policy outcomes — or even understanding the value of such an exercise.
danfromwaltham puts up a “Harvard” study. Skeptical that dfw and
BMG have a major policy scoop not being discussed elsewhere, a few posters do a precursory look and discover that it isn’t a Harvard study, the authors are suspect, and the only traction this has gotten is in rightwingnutistan.
No, danfromwaltham, it is not the job of this community to perform a detailed critique of each part of an academic study. Remember, most folks on here aren’t academics in the first place. Those of us who are occasionally dive in, and typically come up with a long list of reasons why the article’s research methods are problematic.
We’re not your monkeys. When you start showing up using respectful language, being thoughtful, and having clearly done some of the homework yourself, you might find a community more willing to consider what you’re bringing to the table. But, keep coming with foolishness, and you’ll keep getting the cold shoulder.
She basically said I was stupid, unable to dissect the study. Glad to know many here don’t have that training.
I could have altered the title of my diary, it would have the same impact. I read the report and it basically confirmed what I knew all along. Have to admit, this study is more accurate than Al Gore’s movie, no?
Dan’s uncomprehending response, his clear difficulty with reading comprehension (“Every indication I had was that this was a Harvard study”), and his unjustified certainty of the “findings” indicate that his contribution lies below the general level of conversations on this blog.
Why have a prolific contributor constantly inviting the question “intellectual dishonesty or cognitive deficiency? intellectual dishonesty or cognitive deficiency?”
Here’s the problem. The “study” was described in Boston Magazine as follows, under the title (since changed):
Harvard Gun Study Claims Banning Weapons Doesn’t Decrease Violence
The quote below indicates how Dan could have misinterpreted the report:
In fairness to Dan his premise of the study’s credibility is understandable, given the way it was described in the article.
Particularly, if he had quoted Boston Magazine, one might generously grant the point. However, even the Boston Magazine article refers to a “Harvard publication” rather than a “Harvard study”.
These kinds of statistical studies also seem to be open to picking and choosing the variables one studies. Comparing Russia and the U.S. on murder rate is odd on a number of levels. It’s not like comparing Belgium’s and the Netherland’s economic performance, for example.
…but non policy wonks tend to forget that people will conflate “publication” with “study” when the sponsor of same is perceived to be credible.
Which is why “truth in packaging” isn’t limited to fast food.
Yes. The source of information matters. Neither you nor I are in a position to double-check the authors’ data, and their interpretation of it. So it matters whether the study was (a) conducted by faculty at a well-respected university and published in a peer-reviewed neutral journal, or (b) conducted by a couple of ideologues with little academic pedigree to speak of, and published in a student-edited journal with an ideological bent.
Is it Ok to question their ulterior motives without being called a “Denier”?
This gun study deals with, I think, historical facts. The authors are either right or wrong. Harvard decided to publish it, I mean, the link says Harvard.
If just for the sake of argument, we assume the study is factual, not based on hypothetical models 50-100 years out, if it is factually sound, would you then say more gun control is not the answer?
First off, note he still thinks Harvard published this study!
Second, it’s clear he doesn’t understand what statistical analysis is. No one is particularly disputing the data (i.e., the facts) on the study. The question is what conclusions can be drawn from the data. Murder rates in various countries have not been kept secret up till now. Note how he now thinks he’s qualified to rule of climate science too.
Again, the super-prolific danfromwaltham just lacks the capacity to discuss this stuff.
Simple math to me.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/
That is simply incorrect. In fact, a small group of Harvard law students decided to publish it.
It all very confusing.
It’s a historical peculiarity that, unlike pretty much every other academic field, most legal scholarship is published in non-peer-reviewed journals that are edited by students. In the early part of the 20th century, when law schools as we know them were just getting going, many of the schools set up a single, student-edited journal – at Harvard it was the Harvard Law Review, at Yale the Yale Law Journal, etc. The students with the best first-year grades became the editors of those journals; they chose what to publish, and that was that. Membership on the journal’s board of editors became a valued credential that helped open doors to prestigious and high-paying jobs after graduation.
Over the years, the criteria for getting onto the top journals got more complicated (these days it tends to be a combination of first-year grades and a writing competition, sometimes with additional factors thrown in), and on top of that, the schools wanted more students to have the opportunity to work on journals, and hence allowed additional journals to be published under the schools’ names. That’s why we now have publications like the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, which are staffed by students who, of necessity, aren’t on the Harvard Law Review.
The top-level journals like Harvard Law Review tend to be generalist, publishing pieces on all legal subjects and from a variety of perspectives (though there has been plenty of criticism that the top-level journals are ideologically skewed), but most of the second-level journals (including JLPP) are expressly dedicated either to a particular subject matter or a particular ideological viewpoint. JLPP, for instance declares itself “the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.”
I hope this is helpful.
Not being a reader of Law Reviews, it surprises me that a law review, even a conservative law review run by students, would cover policy. Policy outcomes, it would seem to me, are the kinds of things that social scientists study and measure, and where statistical and experimental methodology are keenly important. I’m ready to believe that my preconceived notions on the value of gun control might not or might be confirmed, but doing that calls on the sort of expertise one doesn’t expect to find in lawyers. Liberals advocate gun control due to the dangers of homicide, suicide, and accident, but the effect of laws on rates of homicide, suicide, and accident are difficult to measure. All those things are heavily affected by demographics. Comparing countries is also confusing. A lot of crime, for example, is driven by honor culture. Think of the Scotch-Irish inheritance that has infected/affected the Southeast, or the the ugly scourge of acid attacks in Pakistan.
So there are a lot of variables. There are statistical techniques for navigating some of that, but there’s enough going on that a biased researcher can probably derive any result she or he wants from the data.
And law students are going to jury that?
Preheat oven To 425f. moisten with water 6 To 8 (1/2 inch thick) bone-inor boneless pork chops. 1. shake moistened chops, 1 To 2 at a time, inshaker bag with one packet Of coating mix. Discard any remaining mix andbag. 2. bake at 425f in ungreased or foil-lined 15x10x1 inch baking panuntil cooked through. 1/2 inch thick 15 minutes do not cover or turnpork during baking. Bake thicker chops 5 To 10 minutes longer.
Thank you Paul for being somewhat rationale.
To Kirth and Kbusch, perhaps if you recall my diary on if we need to cull the seal population, any idea who I sources? Yep, Boston Magazine.
In preparing this diary, I quoted no sources, I went directly to the PDF file, took the time to read it, and highlight what I thought was important. I first heard of the study or publication through a friend, and saw many postings, including Boston Magazine. But instead on relying on other people’s interpretations, I read the PDF file myself and drew my own conclusion.
But the source doesn’t matter to you two, I quote NY Times or MSNBC, and you still make snide comments, they are wrong, you are always right, that’s what you want to hear and read on BMG.
Hey, the jobs numbers are out next Friday, you can be sure I will write a diary. Hopefully, the pain out in the real world begins to sink in.
As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
The great Libertarian talk show host on RKO. He passed away in May. I would have written a diary but I found out too late. He was funny and smart.
But let’s give credit to some “great” right-wing talk jock, by all means.
I read it in Boston Magazine first.
I said where I first heard it.
I recall a topic Gene did in vegetarians. Someone called in and asked what if aliens came to earth and rounded up humans like we do cattle, for their consumption. Gene said if we ever allow ourselves to be put in that situation, we deserve it then.
He was a legend
Need to get shut eye. I really think we’ve made progress tonite.