Month: March 2008

You can actually find out what states have the highest suicide rate per capita here.  By the looks of it, Montana, Nevada, Alaska, New Mexico, and Wyoming are pretty depressing places to live, since they are 1 through 5 respectively.  Rounding out the bottom?  New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland and Hawaii.

Is it really a surprise that the states VPC mentions have high rates of suicide using a gun, given they have high rates of sucides?  Also, how else are you going to kill yourself in Montana and Alaska?  There are few high bridges, few trains, no tall buildings.  I mean, I guess you could smother yourself in honey and go try to find a grizzly, but seriously, this is about as surprising as finding out that New York leads the nation in suicidal dives off tall buildings, or that San Francisco leads the nation in bridge suicides.

That’s not even getting into whether taking things away from people because they might kill themselves with it makes sense as a public public policy measure.  I don’t think it does.  I suspect most Americans would agree.

Both blogs have approved more comments.  They only seem to be approving comments that they feel like responding to, so pretty clearly they aren’t willing to engage in unmoderated, or even reasonably moderated debate on the subject.  One of my posts not approved questioned their statistics.  I’ll give them credit, their moderating policy is smarter (from their point of view) than the Brady’s.  Make it look like you have comments, and only let the people see the comments that make your argument look good.  Let’s take a look at some of their claims:

Phelps, that’s actually not true. If you look at CDC data for 2005 and analyze the states by gun death rate per capita, the states with the highest per capita gun death rates are (in order): Louisiana, Alaska, Montana, Tennessee, Alabama, Nevada, Arkansas, Arizona, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Wyoming. There’s not a state in that group with tough gun laws. Interestingly, the bottom six states with the lowest gun death rates per capita are: Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Hawaii (lowest). All states with tough, smart gun laws.

Except they are conflating gun deaths with gun violence again.  What they are referring to is a VPC study using CDC data.  The problem, again, is these statistics include suicide by gun, which is going to be higher in areas where guns are more common in homes.  Would CSGV feel better if people threw themselves in front of trains instead?  If you remove suicides, Alaska, Montana, West Virginia, and Wyoming all have homicide by gun rates lower than the national average, and in the case of Alaska, Montana and Wyoming, far lower than New Jersey or New York.  And keep in mind this is just gun homicide, not overall violence.

There’s an old saying, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”  There is a correlary here that should go “Beware of gun control groups bearing statistics.”

UPDATE: Sailorcurt shows some of the samples that haven’t been approved.  Pretty clearly they aren’t going to let through any argument they can’t refute.  At this point, I’ll go back to ignoring them, since pretty clearly before the pro-gun folks came along, they had no commenters.