Obama administration rejects reasonable person standard in determining what represents sexual harassment.

The Obama administration apparently views an unwelcome request for a data as serious as rape? In a letter to the University of Montana, the Obama administration defined sexual harassment this way:

"an unwelcome request for a date . . . need not be 'objectively offensive' . . . regardless of the reasonableness of her feelings, and school administrators may be legally required to discipline her 'harasser.'"

Seriously?  From the WSJ:

The letter rejects the requirement, established by legal precedent and previous Education Department guidance, that sexual harassment must be "objectively offensive." By eliminating this "reasonable person" standard—which the Education Department has required since at least 2003, and which protects the accused against unreasonable or insincere allegations—the right not to be offended has been enshrined in a federal mandate. 

The letter further states that campuses have "an obligation to respond to student-on-student harassment" even when that harassment occurs off-campus. In some circumstances, the letter says, universities may take "disciplinary action against the harasser" even "prior to the completion of the Title IX and Title IV investigation/resolution." In plain English: Students can be punished before they are found guilty of harassment. . . .

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Chris Wallace refers to MGLC as "the bible of the pro gun rights movement" and that "there are now some pretty impressive numbers to back up that premise"

Here is a partial transcript from Fox News' Special Report on May 10th:

CHRIS WALLACE: The bible of the pro gun rights movement is a book titled "More Guns, Less Crime." It's a title that has been endlessly mocked by gun control advocates. But tonight correspondent Doug McKelway tell us there are now some pretty impressive numbers to back up that premise. Good evening, Doug.
DOUG MCKELWAY, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Chris. Those numbers come from a Department of Justice report released this month that analyzed gun crime from 1993 to 2011. And it found homicides declined by 39 percent while non-fatal gun crimes dropped 69 percent. And it found that among prisoners convicted of gun crimes, only two percent of them bought their guns at a flea market or at a gun show.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS COX, NRA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: The people who support this freedom know these truths to be self-evident. They know that law abiding gun owners aren't the problem. Our opponents are going to ignore the facts the way they've always ignored the facts.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCKELWAY: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attributed the gun crime decline to the ten-year assault weapons ban that Congress passed in 1994.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NANCY PELOSI, (D-CA) HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: Deaths have gone down in large measure because of the legislation that was passed. The problem is even though we have great laws in California and in Maryland and New York, Connecticut, you can name many states, as long as these those guns can cross state lines without having background check attached to them, we still need that legislation.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCKELWAY: A recent study by the liberal Center for American Progress backs Pelosi's point, finding, quote, "A clear link between high levels of gun violence and weak state gun laws." The Center points to New York City, for example, which has dropped from over 2,000 murders a year 20 years to 418 last year.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ARKADI GERNEY, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: What happened in New York was tough laws including tough gun laws, really smart, tough policing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCKELWAY: But the non-partisan DOJ study contradicts Pelosi's view. It found that handguns, not assault rifles, caused 90 percent of fun injuries. And the NRA rejects the Center for American Progress's finding of a link between high gun violence and weak state gun laws.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COX: The sales of the guns in this country have gone through the roof. The number of people with concealed carry permits has gone through the roof. And violent crime with firearms has continued to decrease. You certainly can't make an argument that more guns equal more crimes. And you can make a very serious argument that guns in the hands of law abiding people are a benefit to society.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCKELWAY: Yet a separate gun study by Pew Research on May 7 finds Americans are unaware of the gun crime decline. A majority of American think it has gone up despite this new evidence to the contrary. Chris?
WALLACE: Doug, thank you.

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Big omission in media coverage of 19 injured in New Orleans Mother's Day Parade Shooting

I have been looking at the media coverage of the shooting on Fox News, USA Today, New York Daily News, and others ignore a crucial part of the story: the shooting was likely gang warfare, most likely drug gang warfare.  As the Associated Press notes: "Police say gang turf wars often are the root cause." The surprise is that these other stories often relied on the AP report, but still left out this important fact.

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Chinese Film Director could face fine of up to $26 million for fathering seven children, some thoughts

Assume for a second that the Chinese policy on the number of children makes sense, if you have seven children with seven different women, shouldn't that be treated differently than seven children with the same woman?  Also, why should higher income individuals pay such a much much higher fine for having kids?  Why discourage the smartest, most successful people from having kids?  Presumably, if higher income individuals tried to cheat, it would make enforcement against lower income people more difficult.  But I wonder if that is true.  In the US (where speeding fines are based on the crime) or Finland (where they are also based on income), do you have more people breaking speed limits?  I don't know the answer, but it would be interesting to check.  The simplest way would be to see if these relative rates changed when Finland changed the way it fined speeding.  From the Vancouver Sun:

Zhang, 61, reportedly could face a fine of up to 160 million yuan ($26 million), said the People's Daily newspaper, the Communist Party mouthpiece. People caught breaking China's family planning policy must pay a "social compensation fee" based on their annual income. . . . 

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Crime drops, but Americans think that it has been rising?

For someone deeply involved in the data, it can be surprising to see the gap between what is happening and people's perceptions.  Surely the media has a big effect.

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found. . . .  

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed  more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased. 

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news. . . .

Thanks to Michael Wahl for the link. 

The one serious flaw that I have with PEW's discussion is that they keep discussing 1993 as if it were the peak year in violent crime.  In fact, 1991 was the peak year for murder, robbery, and overall violent crime.  And 1992 was the peak year for rape and aggravated assault.

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Handing out free shotguns in poor areas of Tucson, Az

Why are Democrats so upset about people donating guns to poor people in high crime neighborhoods so that they are better able to protect themselves and their families?  Why is it that Democrats bother claiming that they support the Second Amendment and people's right to defend themselves when they have these types of reactions?  A similar program to the one in Tucson was set up recently in Houston.  From Fox News:

A former mayoral candidate in Tucson, Ariz., is drawing heated criticism from Democrats after he launched a program this week to hand out free shotguns in high-crime neighborhoods.  

Shaun McClusky, who kicked off the program Monday, financed it with initial donor commitments of $12,000. He told FoxNews.com that with those private donations alone, he can arm and train 36 people -- and hopes to begin that process in 60 days.  

McClusky said he's already received more than a dozen responses from residents, "none of them negative, all of them positive." . . . 

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Police and crime in Chicago: The ups and downs in Chicago's crime rates

Remember Rahm Emanuel's campaign promise to put more police on the street?  The Huffington Post reminds us:

Rahm Emanuel campaigned for Chicago mayor on a promise of putting 1,000 more police officers on the city's streets. Now, the man Emanuel picked to be the top cop for the nation's third-largest city says the mayor has told him to slash $190 million from his budget – something people both inside and outside the department say can't be done without layoffs.
It would also likely be the largest cut for any police department in the U.S. during the nation's fiscal crisis.
"I don't see how you're going to (avoid layoffs)," said Robert Weisskopf, the president of the Chicago police lieutenants union. "They've already laid off civilian employees, laid off everybody they can and now we're to the point where watch secretaries (sworn officers) are going out to buy office supplies." . . . .

First Mayor Rahm Emanuel cuts the number of police officers.  Here is data from the FBI's UCR:

2008 13,359 

2009 13,088 

2010 12,515 

2011 12,092 

2012 11,944

The number of police detectives that solve crimes also fell from 1,100 in 2010, the year before Emanuel became mayor, to 924 in 2012 -- that is a 16 percent drop in just two years.

Even worse, under Emanuel police were moved to unfamiliar neighborhoods, losing years of knowledge in dealing with informants and other contacts.  As a great website entitled Second City Cop, which is run by a Chicago cop, explains:

The article explains in detail how Detective Areas were closed, manpower scattered across unfamiliar neighborhoods, and a complete lack of promoting detectives hamstrung the D-unit over the course of years. J-Fled is quoted along with Tommy Byrne (he loves the reorganization by the way) and numerous anonymous detectives. We haven't heard the clearance rate this year, but we're sure anything above 30% will be touted as brilliant planning by McConsolidation and his staff. . . .

Page 3 of the Chicago magazine article shows the meat of the problem, with the map and discussion clearly showing they moved where detectives are stationed further away from crime spots.

As you may recall, a few months after taking over in July 2011, he said that Emanuel had asked him to cut $190 million from the department’s $1.3 billion annual budget. So the first two years of McCarthy’s tenure have been all about doing more with less. 

The sweeping consolidation plan that he announced in March 2012 eliminated three of Chicago’s 25 police districts, closed two of its five detective headquarters (Area 4, which spanned the Near West Side and included downtown, and Area 5, which stretched from the Far Northwest Side to the Far Southwest Side), and transferred 300-plus detectives to other bureaus. The changes would save as much as $12 million, McCarthy said. 

Unfortunately, the consolidation heaped still more pressure on homicide detectives, who were already struggling to keep up with bigger caseloads. Except for those detectives working in Area South (the police territory that covers roughly the southern third of the city), the realignment (and subsequent renaming) nearly doubled the area that many of them have to cover (see “Going the Distance,” right). 

There are two big drawbacks here. One is that more detectives are working in neighborhoods they’re not yet familiar with. “All the expertise you once had is useless when you’re working on the other side of town,” says a detective from Area Central. “You might as well put me in a new city.” 

Another big drawback to consolidation is that detectives find themselves farther away from crime scenes, sometimes by a dozen or more miles. Getting to the scene fast is crucial in any homicide investigation: Witnesses may scatter or fall victim to gang intimidation. Evidence may get trampled, tampered with, or blown away. Distance continues to be a problem later, when detectives must conduct follow-up interviews or track new witnesses in other parts of town. Says a former police official: “For every hour the detective spends in the car, that’s all time lost to the investigation.” . . . .

Street officers have also informed me that reassignment of officers has paralleled these changes for detectives.  As with detectives, moving officers to less familiar areas loses valuable experience. 

Now note the incredibly low clearance rate in 2012 for these high crime areas.  The Chicago Magazine story makes it clear that while murder clearance rates fell city wide under Emanuel, the drops were particularly large in the most violent neighborhoods where the police were being moved out of.

Last year’s clearance rate free fall appears to support the detectives’ concerns: As they moved farther away from crime hot spots, the clearance rates there fell substantially. . . .

Then because of the resulting increase in crime he has to give the existing officers expensive over time.

Hundreds of Chicago police officers are hitting the streets on overtime every night in dangerous neighborhoods, the latest tactic by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration to reduce killings in a city dogged by its homicide rate and heartbreaking stories about honor students and small children caught in the crossfire. . . .  

If it continues, the tactic would cost millions of dollars each month — putting the one initiate on pace to exceed the department's entire overtime budget by fall.

At least it isn't too surprising that more police officers mean less crime.  Emanuel kept promising to hire more police in 2012, but as shown above the opposite continued to occur.  From the Sun Times:

Under fire to reverse a surge in homicides that spiked 66 percent in March, Emanuel has promised to hire 450 officers by Dec. 31 [2012] and 500 officers next year to reach an authorized strength of 12,538 officers. 

But Shields said the city could be hard-pressed to keep pace with the number of officers walking out the door. . . .

To put it another way, with the cut in the number of police and moving them to lower crime areas and losing all that experience, the outcome was hardly surprising: "Only 132 of the 507 murder cases in the city last year were closed last year. That makes for a homicide clearance rate of 26 percent—the lowest in two decades, according to internal police records provided to Chicago."   Note that in 2010 the clearance rate was 39 percent and in 2011 it was 34 percent.

Here is the big money quote: "Last year’s department-wide consolidation and reorganization, initiated by Superintendent Garry McCarthy, has made a bad situation even worse. As one South Side detective put it: 'It’s a perfect storm of shit.'”

Additional Information:  After clearance rates plummeted and crime rates soared in 2012, Rahm Emanuel held a press conference talking about reassigning 200 officers to patrol.  The Chicago Tribune uncritically reports Emanuel's proposal on January 31, 2013:

Following a deadly start to the year that included the murder of 15-year-old band majorette Hadiya Pendleton, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced today that 200 police officers will be reassigned to patrol work. 

The officers, who had been performing administrative duties will be replaced by civilians, according to an announcement from the mayor’s office. The first officers will be reassigned this weekend and the changes are expected to be completed by the end of March, city officials said. . . .

According to Second City Cop, the Chicago FOP called this: “more smoke and mirrors” and “policing by press conference.”  Rather than actually adding 200 officers this was just going to be part of the 500 new officers that city had already promised to add to offset the 500+ retirees.  Amazingly neither the Chicago Tribune nor the Chicago Sun Times articles on Emanuel's announcement interview the FOP for their reaction. 

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This is just too funny: The British have found a way to reduce people's fear of crime

Instead of letting people defend themselves, the Brits have found that the solution is to hang pom-poms from trees.  Some obviously silly Brits don't think that this will work.

Hundreds of pom-poms and knitted items have been strung from trees and lampposts to help reduce the fear of crime in an area of Leicester.
Leicestershire Police hope the "guerilla knitting" or "yarn bombing" will encourage more people to use Bede Park and Great Central Way.
Some of the park's users told BBC Radio Leicester the items - including tree warmers - do not make them feel safer.
But criminologist Charlotte Bilby said they could have a positive effect. 

'Something silly'Ms Bilby, a senior lecturer in criminology at Northumbria University, said: "I think that making an area look cosier certainly makes an area feel safer.
"If you see something that makes you smile, that makes you think that other people have enjoyed being in that space and have done something funny, something silly in that place, then that's going to change your perception about what it is to be in Bede Park."
Sgt Simon Barnes said: "I am really hopeful that the actions will reduce the fear of becoming a victim of crime, as the perception really is much different to the actual reported levels of crime." . . .

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Helping people in high crime areas defend themselves: The Armed Citizen Project

Houston weather, traffic, news | FOX 26 | MyFoxHouston

This is an interesting project located in Houston, Texas:

The Armed Citizen Project is dedicated to facilitating the armingof law abiding citizens, and analyzing the relationship between increased firearm availability and crime rates. We will choose a mid-high crime neighborhood in Houston, and offer defensiveweapons to citizens that can pass a background check, and that will take our safety, legal, andtactical training. . . . 

From Fox News Houston:

A University of Houston graduate student is doing an unusual study. He's going to give away 20-gauge single-shot shotguns in high-crime neighborhoods to see if it reduces crime."We're not just tossing a bunch of shotguns into a community and walking away," says Kyle Coplen. "What we're doing is finding residents who are interested in protecting themselves. we're not forcing guns on anyone."

From CBS:

A University of Houston graduate student says he’s conducting a study to hopefully answer the question being asked across the country, “Do more guns reduce crime or not?” 

Kyle Coplen, who founded the Armed Citizens Project, is giving away 20-gauge single-shot shotguns to residents in mid- and high-crime neighborhoods to test whether or not the weapon will help reduce crime in the area, according to the group’s website. Coplen says the weapons are not of much value to criminals, but are especially useful for citizens looking to protect themselves from criminals. . . .

Thanks to Kyle Coplen for contacting me earlier today. 

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Great piece by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe: As gun ownership in Massachusetts plummeted, murders and violent crime soared

The whole piece here is highly recommended.  From Sunday's Boston Globe:

IN 1998, Massachusetts passed what was hailed as the toughest gun-control legislation in the country. Among other stringencies, it banned semiautomatic “assault” weapons, imposed strict new licensing rules, prohibited anyone convicted of a violent crime or drug trafficking from ever carrying or owning a gun, and enacted severe penalties for storing guns unlocked. 

“Today, Massachusetts leads the way in cracking down on gun violence,” said Republican Governor Paul Cellucci as he signed the bill into law. “It will save lives and help fight crime in our communities.” Scott Harshbarger, the state’s Democratic attorney general, agreed: “This vote is a victory for common sense and for the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” One of the state’s leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. “The new gun law,” he predicted, “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.” 

It didn’t. . . .

Jacoby points out that while gun ownership plummeted, murder rates soared.

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Country with highest murder rate has low gun ownership rate (at least if you believe the silly Small Arms Survey)

If you believe the left wing, pro-gun control, error filed Small Arms Survey, Honduras had a well below average gun ownership rate in 2007 but a murder rate of 82 per 100,000.  That is about 17 times greater than the US rate that year.  From Fox News:

For the second straight year, Honduras' second largest city topped the list of the world's most dangerous cities, according to a Mexican research center.
Drug violence, gang activity and the targeted killing of women all contributed to San Pedro de Sula's top ranking in the list compiled by the organization Seguridad, Justicia y Paz.
"San Pedro de Sula authorities have claimed that the placement of the city in the first place in the rankings hurts his image. They have also argued that our figures are wrong," a statement from the organization noted. "But we rely on official figures regarding the effect on the ranking, which only recognize the reality. This is not damaging the image of the city the violence and the inability of governments to contain it and reduce it is. Hiding it never resolves problems." . . .

The average gun ownership rate across 10.2 guns per 100 people.  Honduras' was 6.2 per 100 people.

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Massachusetts' murder rate has risen much faster than that of its neighbors or the US rate since the 1998 firearms licensing bill

From the Boston Globe:

Massachusetts has a national reputation as a bastion of gun control, but crimes and injuries related to firearms have risen — sometimes dramatically — since the state passed a comprehensive package of gun laws in 1998. 

Murders committed with firearms have increased significantly, aggravated assaults and robberies involving guns have risen, and gunshot injuries are up, according to FBI and state data. 

To gun-rights groups like the National Rifle Association, these statistics are evidence that gun control does not work. But to gun-control advocates, the numbers show that no state — no matter how tough the laws — is protected from firearms violence when guns are brought in from other states. 

“The quality of your gun-licensing laws is only as good as those surrounding you,” said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist. . . .  

In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, a striking increase from the 65 in 1998, said Fox, the Northeastern professor. Nationwide, such murders increased only 3 percent from 1999 to 2010, the CDC says.

There were increases in other crimes involving guns in Massachusetts, too. From 1998 to 2011, aggravated assaults with guns rose 26.7 percent. Robberies with firearms increased 20.7 percent during that period, according to an FBI analysis conducted for the Globe. . . . .

The number of registered guns in Massachusetts dropped by 86% -- from 1,541,201 prior to the 1998 law to just over 215,000.

It is hard to see how to see how the presence of these other states could cause Massachusetts' murder rate to rise.  Those states were there before the 1998 law and criminals could obtain their guns before the law.  It is easy to see how the spillover might keep the crime rates from falling, but if the law helped at all, Massachusetts' murder rate should have fallen relative to the rate in the rest of the US as well as the states that are Massachusetts' neighbors.  

The results for robbery are even more dramatic.

Other states are considering licensing laws.  See Maryland here and here.

Mr. O'Malley, a Democrat, will testify before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee in favor of his bill, which would also ban assault weapons, limit magazine capacities to 10 rounds and require prospective gun buyers to complete a safety course and pay a $100 application fee. . . .

and 

More than 80 percent of Maryland voters support requiring residents to obtain a license before purchasing a handgun, according to a poll released Wednesday by a gun-control group. 

A poll commissioned by Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence found that 81 percent of voters — including 64 percent of Republicans — prefer instituting a policy where would-be gun purchasers would have to get a license and go through fingerprinting, safety training and a criminal background check. . . . 

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Attempt to get restraining order doesn't protect woman even within the court room

The link to the video is available here.

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NPR misses major point on "Mental Health Gun Laws Unlikely To Reduce Shootings"

NPR has this to say about the ability to predict the likelihood of violence by the mentally ill.

Researchers say that one issue with mental health laws like New York's is that they compel mental health professionals to report thousands of people who aren't at all likely to shot someone. 

Barry Rosenfeld is psychology professor at Fordham University in The Bronx: "With these laws we are destined to cast a very large net that will probably restrict a lot of people's behavior unnecessarily, and may be we will prevent and incident or two, I hope." . . .

"an accurate assessment of the likelihood of future violence is virtually impossible." 

"The biggest risk for gun violence is possession of a gun," says Hoge. "And there's no evidence that the mentally ill possess guns or commit gun violence at any greater rate than the normal population." 

So you would think that the conclusion of the piece would be that we shouldn't be taking away people's guns unless it is somewhat clear that someone will engage in violence, right?  No, NPR concludes that the safe way to stop these attacks is to take away guns. The problem is that taking away people's guns seems unlikely to solve the problem even if the violent people could be identified.  The reason?  These killers often are planning their attacks months or even more than a year in advance and it is very hard to stop someone who is willing to plan that far in advance from getting a gun.  So should we just lock up people who we think are might be violent?  Apparently, not according to NPR, but gun control is still considered a good option.

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Ben Swann on Piers Morgan’s homicide statistics

This is a well done take and it uses similar information to what I have used previously (see for example here).
Two notes:
1) The Small Arms Survey data that he refers to that purportedly measures gun ownership rates is highly dubious.  The organization that put them together is a gun control organization and they want to make it look like there is more murder in high gun ownership countries.
2) I need to point out that my work has tried to argue that cross-sectional analysis is rarely very useful (MGLC, chp. 2 and The Bias Against Guns, chp. 5).  Still that is something that most people do.

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So what can the US learn from other developed countries regarding guns and crime

Charles Blow recently claimed in the New York Times: “America has the highest gun homicide rate, the highest number of guns per capita . . . .”  On Sunday, the New York Times quotes researcher David Hemenway as claiming: “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death.”  CNN’s Piers Morgan believes: “America has the worst incidents of gun murders of any of what they call the civilized world.”

If you look at just the countries used in the Small Arms Survey, you get this.

Data available here.

Note that it is somewhat misleading to speak of a US homicide rate as 3 percent of the counties in the US account for over 70 percent of the murders (they have about 23 percent of the population).

Much is made of comparing some rather arbitrarily defined "civilized" nations, but what can Americans learn from these nations?   If the non-US developed nations show anything, even with the extremely questionable data that Charles Blow at the New York Times apparently trusts regarding gun ownership rates, it shows that higher gun ownership means lower homicide or no change in gun homicide rates.  He just hadn’t even bothered to graph out the numbers.

There is a real problem in using cross-sectional data.  Below is part of a long discussion in The Bias Against Guns, Chp. 5 (More Guns, Less Crime also has a long discussion in Chp. 2).  Take a simple example.  Suppose for the sake of argument that high-crime countries are the ones that most frequently adopt the most stringent gun control laws. What if gun control actually lowered crime, but not by enough to reduce rates to the same low levels prevailing in the majority of countries that did not adopt the laws. Looking across countries, it would then falsely appear that stricter gun control resulted in higher crime. Economists refer to this as an “endogeniety” problem. The adoption of the policy is a reaction to other events (that is, “endogenous”), in this case crime. To resolve this, one must examine how the high-crime areas that chose to adopt the controls changed over time —not only relative to their own past levels but also relative to areas that did not institute such controls. 

Unfortunately, many contemporary discussions rely on misinterpretations of cross-sectional data. The New York Times recently conducted a cross-sectional study of murder rates in states with and without the death penalty, and found that “Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows, while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average” (Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden, “States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates,” New York Times, September 22, 2000, p. A1.).  However, they erroneously concluded that the death penalty did not deter murder. The problem is that the states without the death penalty (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Vermont) have long enjoyed relatively low murder rates, something that might well have more to do with other factors than the death penalty. Instead one must compare, over time, how murder rates change in the two groups – those adopting the death penalty and those that did not.

Of course, I have other problems with the New York Times discussion.  For example, the rates of gun ownership for Switzerland and Israel are ridiculously low.  This survey excludes all the military weapons kept in Swiss homes in 2007 because they were technically owned by the government.  Israeli guns are also excluded for the same reason.  But if people have possession of guns in their homes for decades, the issue should be that public possession, not who technically owned the guns.  My point above was that even if those numbers are taken as given, you still find the opposite relationship from what the New York Times was claiming.  Of course, if you fix them, you will get a negative relationship across all developed countries even with the US observation included.  The reason that the Small Arms Survey messes up those two entries is that Israel and Switzerland are very low murder rate countries and giving them their true values would pull down the regression line a lot.  Putting the US all by itself out there at 88 firearms per 100 people drives the supposed positive relationship claimed for developed countries (see below).

The graph showing all non-US countries is shown here.

So what if we asked a different question?  Including the US in the data shows the absurdity of the Small Arms Survey measure of gun ownership in 2007.  They define it in such a way to exclude the military weapons in Swiss homes and to exclude most Israeli guns because the government technically owns them.  The Small Arms Survey claims that there are only 7 guns per 100 people in Israel, when up to 15 percent of the adult Jewish Israeli population has been able to openly carry handguns.  Virtually all guns in Israel are technically owned by the government, but Israelis may have possession of a gun for decades.  It seems that possession of the gun and not technical ownership is what is the real question here.  Switching either or both of these countries so that they had a higher gun ownership rate than the US would offset their bias for the US rate. In any case, despite my objections to both cross-sectional data and the obviously bogus Small Arms Survey measure of gun ownership, here are the results with the US included.  Doing this leaves the result for the world essentially unchanged and makes the relationship for OECD countries equal zero.

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