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While doing research for our upcoming book Wedged, we came across two graphs floating around the Internet that gave us a long double-take-turned-digression. The two graphs each tell a story about the link between gun ownership and homicide across the 50 states of the US. 

One shows a very strong positive correlation; one shows no correlation at all. The two graphs are posted below, with their sources. As an exercise, take a few minutes to inspect the graphs closely, using some of the lessons from our last post on data in policy debate, and take a look at the pages they came from to understand the methodology and sourcing (spoiler: neither has totally made-up data). Leave a comment with your answer to: “why do these graphs look so different?”

We’ll post a follow-up early next week with a post that adds whatever we found in case the comments don’t get all of it. This is a really fun and enlightening exercise; hope you guys enjoy.

Mother Jones’s positive correlation:

Objectobot’s non-correlation:

35 Comments

  • Benjamin Long, June 5, 2015 @ 5:44 pm Reply

    Homicides vs gun deaths – I’m assuming gun deaths includes suicides. So really the conclusion we can come to here is ‘there is a positive correlation between gun ownership and fatal self inflicted or accidental gunshot wounds’

    Yes, people trying to kill themselves will often go for the easiest option – a firearm if available. Including them in the chart is extremely misleading.

    • Chris McAdam, June 6, 2015 @ 1:33 pm Reply

      Suicides are the majority of gun deaths (overwhelmingly male). Given that men are so much more successful (?) at suicide than women, it is likely those deaths would have occurred some other way if guns were harder to get

    • Something to Consider, June 8, 2015 @ 3:04 am Reply

      Bingo, you got the big one. It’s also worth noting that the second graph includes homicides not caused by guns. So my takeaway here is the same as yours: in states with more guns, guns are used more often in homicide or suicide, but that it doesn’t seem to increase the likelihood that homicide and suicide would happen.

  • Emma Lindsay, June 8, 2015 @ 7:03 pm Reply

    The second graph also shows homicide rate vs percentage of the population owning a firearm. It’s possible that the same percentage of the population that is most likely to commit homicides is also the most likely to be armed. Or, phrased another way, decreasing absolute percentages of gun ownership in the population as a whole is irrelevant if you’re not able to reduce gun ownership among the sub-sections of the population most likely to commit crimes.

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