From: Karsten Baender (KBaender@t-online.de)
Date: Wed Jun 21 2000 - 16:37:33 MDT
> Actually, Germany does have a much lower incidence. However, I
> notice he only
> said murder. What about manslaughter and other forms of illegal
> homicide? Also,
> what are the property crime rates? I notice you left those out,
> as well as other
> violent crime, including non-gun violent crime, like rape, assault,
> manslaughter, negligent homicide, etc. What are the rates of
> burglary, robbery,
> larceny and car theft?
Okay, I took one representative crime out of a greater variety, as I did not
take the time to study the annual reports in every detail. I will do this,
as I have downloaded the documents, but I doubt that this will reveal
anything really new.
Anyway, this discussion might prove quite valuable for me, as we have a hot
discussion on this at University. In Germany, the Anti-Gun faction is very
strong and believes in the theory that no guns results in no gun-related
crimes. I tried pointing out different but it seems that this is quite a
"belief" rather than something rational. As a matter of fact, I am neither
pro-gun nor anti-gun, because I do not have enough information to decide on
this. One of the key arguments that struck me was the fact, that it is
usually non-libertarian countries who forbid guns. The Communists and the
Nazi are but two excellent examples of political systems who had a great
interest in disarming their people.
> As I've repeatedly said, comparing the US average murder rate to
> a european
> average is meaningless because the gun laws vary so widely from
> state to state,
> and those states with the most gun control have the highest rates. If you
> divided US states up between those with strict gun control, and those with
> liberal gun laws, then do your comparison, you will find that the
> controlling
> states are the greatest contributors to the overall US crime rate.
Though I have a list of the crimes per state and per city (for the bigger
ones) I lack a corresponding list with the gun control laws so I could do
this comparison. But I'm sure something like that can be found on the net.
It is indeed a big problem of comparing the two continents. Anyway, the
social differences are big and so I doubt that we would get to good results
using this method. But as I would like to present this to my course, could
you perhaps give me your source of data or a hint where I can find facts to
prove your theory?
> Claiming that only states with big cities have high crime is
> incorrect, as there
> are plenty of big cities with liberal gun laws in states with
> liberal gun laws
> that have low crime rates. Another thing you can do is look at counties of
> similar size and area, that are part of the metro area of a big
> city, but are in
> different states with different gun laws. You can compare
> Rockingham County, in
> New Hapmshire and Middlesex County in Massachusetts, for example,
> or counties in
> Virginia and Maryland that surround Washington DC, or counties in
> Missouri and
> Kansas surrounding Kansas City...
Well, there's a word: I trust only in the statistics I have falsified
myself. I have studied political economics before switching to law, and my
statistics teacher began his second course with the book "How to lie with
statistics". It was very, very interesting to see how this can work. As most
people do not understand this, they put a blind trust in anything that is
shown with numbers.
Karsten
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