Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Guns and Crime

The FBI is reporting that violent crime, especially murder is down 10% this year. You suppose that this
could have had anything to do with it? 2009 number is extrapolated from 11 reported months.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

1. Causation vs. correlation.

2. The number of NICS checks does not necessarily correlate to the number of people buying guns. Many gun owners own more than one gun. It could simply be people enlarging their collections.

Billll said...

It correlates closely enough to people buying guns. It just doesn't tell you if it's Mrs. Soccermom buying her first or Mr. Blastomatic buying his 700th.

And yes, crime could be going down for other reasons. I won't claim that gun sales and crime reduction are directly related, but I'm pretty sure there's some connection. In Chicago, for example, grime goes up with gun sales. Of course those sales don't show up on the NICS data.